Referencing local variable before assignment results in unexpected behavior

[Tamas_Papp]

@StefanKarpinski

When people over the decades have complained that functional programming in Python is hard because it doesn’t have closures, this is what they’re complaining about.

While I don’t want to echo Dijkstra’s comment about BASIC in relation to Python 2 (it deserves much better), a lot of its design choices make transitioning to languages that mesh better with a functional style difficult.

Ironically, this includes Python 3.