The infamous issue https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/28789 has been on most of our minds for a while now. Although I’ve stopped posting there, I can tell you I’ve been thinking about it a lot, as have Stefan and Jameson and others, and we have continued discussing it off and on. We should re…

For what it’s worth, one of the more confusing things is that the name resolution is within the scope and a syntactic, not semantic thing. By this, I mean: julia> x=1; julia> function f() @show x false && (x=1) nothing end julia> function g() @show x #fals…

FWIW, I really like @jeff.bezanson ’s proposal, along with introducing local for and global for (and let), which defaults to local for now, with the option of changing the default later (whether in 1.3 or 2.0) after some experience has been gained, as advocated by @Liso and @oxinabox . Apart from bein…

Thinking a bit more about this, for! i = ... could additionally be made to imply for outer i, and this could be how it’s explained in a teaching context, hence avoiding any reference to scope: just say it means that “variables can get overwritten by the loop”. If/when the default is changed to globa…

[image] s-broda: this could be how it’s explained in a teaching context, hence avoiding any reference to scope I am not sure why one would jump through hoops just to avoid mentioning scope (briefly, of course). Maybe I was lucky to teach some exceptionally bright students, but usually even s…

[image] Tamas_Papp: I rarely saw for loops that accumulate in global scope in the wild in Julia, even for v0.6, because it is bad style. It’s perfectly good style for interactive exploration, where you usually don’t write functions. Not all coding is about performance or reusability.

As far as I am concerned, the idea is not to avoid introducing scope, but to postpone the discussion to a more appropriate time than literally the first 20 minutes of the first lecture (which may not even be on programming; in my case it’s finance). It’s easy to forget how hard these concepts are fo…

[image] s-broda: just from the number of people running into this issue, it is clear that there is an issue here I am not so sure about this, since we don’t know the base (to be fair, the this can go both ways, since people could encounter the issue and not show up here or other forums). […

If you read my 2 posts above, my thinking was precisely that if the proposals I summarized are implemented, then we may get around having to change the semantics, by implementing appropriate warnings and errors and introducing useful syntactic sugar, viz., for! i being sugar for global for outer i. …

I have taught absolute beginners (other languages) and is indeed not really that difficult to introduce scope to them in a way they understand IF you can do it at the appropriate time (i.e. when introducing functions), and if it is a the version of scope as implemented in any other language: You ge…

Adding my 2c to the teaching discussion, particularly fresh since I’m just wrapping up teaching an intro computing course for biologists in python. My experience is that students, esp in an intro course, will take a lot on faith. All the syntax they’re learning is new, all the concepts are new. If …

Another possible solution to the global scope debacle

Internals & Design

StefanKarpinski October 23, 2018, 9:00pm 232

The proposal for my new solution is here:

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New scope solution Internals & Design proposal	235	22330	January 14, 2020
Global scope confusion again General Usage question , scope	52	6960	May 17, 2025
Local vs global scope again General Usage	30	2480	August 9, 2020
REPL and for loops (scope behavior change) General Usage	42	15306	September 16, 2020
Explain scoping confusion to a programming beginner New to Julia question	26	3353	August 11, 2020

Another possible solution to the global scope debacle

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