The issue of the scoping rules of top-level for loops (and their kind) revives from time to time, and it seems that this will continue happening for a while; so I thought that it might be useful to share some thoughts and positive experiences about this in the context of explaining Julia to new user…

[image] Tamas_Papp: I am not sure what other scripting languages you are referring to (please be more specific, it could help focus the discussion), but AFAIK Matlab didn’t even have namespaces prior to 2008. Namespaces are largely orthogonal to globals for this sort of scoping, so we can tal…

Please don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not angry at unilateral moves. I’m not forcefully fighting against you. And I’m certainly not against Julia as an interactive scripting language. I know how scripting workflows work, I’ve used Matlab for over a decade, and I’m aware of the prevailing menta…

[image] mbauman: Please don’t put words in my mouth OK, my apologies for misunderstanding. [image] mbauman: I simply wanted to point out the other side of the coin. For sure. I think a lot of people here, myself included from my old C++ days, appreciate the value in not having an exc…

[image] jlperla: so maybe we can focus on how best to support current and future users. That was precisely the original intention of this thread, but taking the scoping rules as they are right now, rather than giving ground for yet another debate about whether they should be changed or not. …

[image] jlperla: Rebugger in its current form is a casualty. Rebugger works fine with IJulia, as I understand it, because the softscope transformation doesn’t touch macro contents.

[image] mbauman: the Rebugger depends upon it It looks like there is a chance that let’s scoping rule will not be changed (hence not breaking Rebugger): New scope solution - #223 by jeff.bezanson Speaking of let, how about “wrap for in let together with initialization” as another tip?

[image] stevengj: Do we just want to punish people who don’t care about performance and want to play around interactively? Julia should be inconvenient for such users, even if it comes with no benefit for serious software development that doesn’t use global scope much? While I recognize that …

[image] Tamas_Papp: No, I don’t want to “punish” anyone. I just think that even from a pedagogical point of view, sugar-coating the issue for newbies harms them in the long run. Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you sound malicious. When you say you don’t want to “sugar-coat the issue” because “n…

[image] Tamas_Papp: I recognize that you would like to use Julia as a scripting language in teaching I think there is a misunderstanding. Doing experiments with created or imported data at REPL is not ‘using Julia as a scripting language’ - actually it’s an interactive way to work. btw: you’l…

[image] stevengj: it sounds like you want working in global scope to be hard as an end in itself . Just to clarify: I think of the combination of nontrivial control flow (for, while, etc) and global state as something that should be possible and has some uses, but I don’t think the language s…

Tips to cope with scoping rules of top level `for` loops etc

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Tips to cope with scoping rules of top level `for` loops etc

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