Do you use the “global” statement in Python? [closed]

Answer 1

If I can avoid it, no. And, to my knowledge, there is always a way to avoid it. But I'm not stating that it's totally useless either

Answer 2

I avoid it and we even have a pylint rule that forbids it in our production code. I actually believe it shouldn't even exist at all.

Answer 3

It can be useful in threads for sharing state (with locking mechanisms around it).

However, I rarely if ever use it.

Answer 4

In my view, as soon as you feel the need to use global variables in a python code, it's a great time to stop for a bit and work on refactoring of your code.
Putting the global in the code and delaying the refactoring process might sound promising if your dead-line is close, but, believe me, you're not gonna go back to this and fix unless you really have to - like your code stopped working for some odd reason, you have to debug it, you encounter some of those global variables and all they do is mess things up.

So, honestly, even it's allowed, I would as much as I can avoid using it. Even if it means a simple classes-build around your piece of code.

Answer 5

Objects are the prefered way of having non-local state, so global is rarely needed. I dont think the upcoming nonlocal modifier is going to be widely used either, I think its mostly there to make lispers stop complaining :-)

Answer 6

I use it for global options with command-line scripts and 'optparse':

my main() parses the arguments and passes those to whatever function does the work of the script... but writes the supplied options to a global 'opts' dictionary.

Shell script options often tweak 'leaf' behavior, and it's inconvenient (and unnecessary) to thread the 'opts' dictionary through every argument list.