Simulating nonlocal Keyword in Python 2.x

2013-08-04 15:30

The overall direction where Python 3 is going might be a bit worrying, but it’s undeniable that the 3.0 line has some really nice features and quality-of-life improvements. What’s not to love about Unicode string literals enabled by default? Or the print function? What about range, map and filter all being generators? Neato!

There are also few lesser known points. One is the new nonlocal keyword. It shares the syntax with the global keyword, which would make it instantaneously fishy just by this connotation. However, nonlocal looks genuinely useful: it allows to modify variables captured inside function’s closure:

  1. def count_parity(numbers):
  2.     even_count = odd_count = 0
  3.  
  4.     def examine(number):
  5.         if number % 2 == 0:
  6.             nonlocal even_count
  7.             even_count += 1
  8.         else:
  9.             nonlocal odd_count
  10.             odd_count += 1
  11.  
  12.     list(map(examine, numbers))
  13.     return even_count, odd_count

It’s something you would do quite a lot in certain other languages (*cough* JavaScript), so it’s good that Python has got around to support the notion as well. Syntax here is a bit clunky, true, but that’s simply a trade off, stemming directly from the lack of variable declarations in Python.

What about Python 2.x, though – are we out of luck? Well, not completely. There are a few ways to emulate nonlocal through other pythonic capabilities, sometimes even to better effect than the nonlocal keyword would yield.

Use generator instead

Speaking of yielding… As you have probably noticed right away, the example above is quite overblown and just plain silly. You don’t need to play functional just to count some values – you would use a loop instead:

  1. def count_parity(numbers):
  2.     even_count = odd_count = 0
  3.     for number in numbers:
  4.         if number % 2 == 0:
  5.             even_count += 1
  6.         else:
  7.             odd_count += 1
  8.      return even_count, odd_count

Really, the previous version is just a mindless application of the classic Visitor pattern, which is another reason why you shouldn’t do that: pattern overuse is bad. This saying, Visitor obviously has its place: it’s irreplaceable when traversing more complicated structures in more bureaucratic languages. A simple list of numbers in Python is the direct opposite of both of these characteristics.

Complex data structures exist in any language, however. How would we run some Python code for every node in a tree, or maybe graph? Unrolling the DFS or BFS or whatever traversal algorithm we use certainly doesn’t sound like an elegant and reusable approach.
But even then, there is still no need for functions and closures. We can easily get away with the simple for loop, if we just find a suitable iterable to loop over:

  1. def bst_count_parity(tree):
  2.     """Count the number of even and odd numbers in binary search tree."""
  3.     even_count = odd_count = 0
  4.     for node in bst_nodes(tree):
  5.         if node.value % 2 == 0:
  6.             even_count += 1
  7.         else:
  8.             odd_count += 1
  9.     return even_count, odd_count

The bst_nodes function above is not black magic by any stretch. It’s just a simple example of generator function, taking advantage of the powerful yield statement:

  1. def bst_nodes(tree):
  2.     """Yields nodes of binary tree in breadth-first order."""
  3.     queue = [tree]
  4.     while queue:
  5.         node = queue.popleft()
  6.         yield node
  7.         if node.left:
  8.             queue.append(node.left)
  9.         if node.right:
  10.             queue.append(node.right)

This works because both bst_count_parity and bst_nodes functions are executed “simultaneously”. That has the same practical effect as calling the visitor function to process a node, only the “function” is concealed as the body of for loop.

Language geeks (and Lisp fans) would say that we’ve exchanged a closure for continuation. There is probably a monad here somewhere, too.

Create reference where there is none

Generators can of course solve a lot of problems that we may want to address with nonlocal, but it’s true you cannot write them all off just by clever use of yield statement. For the those rare occasions – when you really, positively, truly need a mutable closure – there are still some options on the board.

The crucial observation is that while the closure in Python 2.x is indeed immutable – you cannot add new variables to it – the objects inside need not be. If you are normally able to change their state, you can do so through captured variables as well. After all, you are still just “reading” those variables; they do not change, even if the objects they point to do.

Hence the solution (or workaround, more accurately) is simple. You need to wrap your value inside a mutable object, and access it – both outside and inside the inner function – through that object only. There are few choices of suitable objects to use here, with lists and dictionaries being the simplest, built-in options:

  1. def incr(redis, key):
  2.     """Increments value of Redis key, as if Redis didn't have INCR command.
  3.    :return: New value for the key
  4.    """
  5.     res = []
  6.  
  7.     def txn(pipe):
  8.         res[0] = int(pipe.get(key)) + 1
  9.         pipe.multi()
  10.         pipe.set(key, res[0])
  11.  
  12.     redis.transaction(txn, key)
  13.     return res[0]

If you become fond of this technique, you may want to be more explicit and roll out your own wrapper. It might be something like a Var class with get and set methods, or just a value attribute.

Classy solution

Finally, there is a variant of the above approach that involves a class rather than function. It is strangely similar to “functor” objects from the old C++, back when it didn’t support proper lambdas and closures. Here it is:

  1. def incr(redis, key):
  2.     """Increments value of Redis key, as if Redis didn't have INCR command.
  3.    :return: New value for the key
  4.    """
  5.     class IncrTransaction(object):
  6.         def __call__(self, pipe):
  7.             self.result = int(pipe.get(key)) + 1
  8.             pipe.multi()
  9.             pipe.set(key, self.result)
  10.  
  11.     txn = IncrTransaction()
  12.     redis.transaction(txn, key)
  13.     return txn.result

Its main advantage (besides making it a bit clearer what’s going on) is the potential for extracting the class outside of the function – and thus reusing it. In the above example, you would just need to add the __init__(self, key) method to make the class independent from the enclosing function.

Ironically, though, that would also defeat the whole point: you don’t need a mutable closure if you don’t need a closure at all. Problem solved? ;-)

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Author: Xion, posted under Programming »



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