Use of “global” keyword in Python

Question

What I understand from reading the documentation is that Python has a separate namespace for functions, and if I want to use a global variable in that function, I need to us

Answer 1

• You can access global keywords without keyword global
• To be able to modify them you need to explicitly state that the keyword is global. Otherwise, the keyword will be declared in local scope.

Example:

words = [...] 

def contains (word): 
    global words             # <- not really needed
    return (word in words) 

def add (word): 
    global words             # must specify that we're working with a global keyword
    if word not in words: 
        words += [word]