Very minor style nit.  In general, it's not considered good style to use mutable objects in default argument values.  importlib's _bootstrap.__import__() does just this for its globals, locals, and fromlist arguments.

The implementation currently doesn't abuse this, or allow any of the extensions to abuse, it may be possible in the future to naively cause negative side-effects due to mutate the keyword arguments.  It would be better to use non-mutable default values in the argument list.

How about the attached?

On Jul 30, 2012, at 04:39 AM, Meador Inge wrote:

>Meador Inge added the comment:
>
>How about the attached?

What about something like:

    globals = ({} if globals is None else globals)

and similarly for locals?

Attached is a patch that drops all mutable default arguments to __import__() and updates the docs. I went with Barry's approach but made it compatible with PEP 8 (bad, FLUFL; no unneeded parens!). I also ignored the locals argument since __import__ doesn't even use it.

Assigning to Georg as a release blocker to make a call as to whether I can apply this to 3.3 of if I need to wait until 3.4 since this is not a critical fix but a good thing to do. Just assign back to me once the decision has been made.

LGTM.

Looks good and safe to me. +1.

New changeset 4240282a9f4a by Brett Cannon in branch 'default':
Issue #15471: Don't use mutable object as default values for the
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/4240282a9f4a

On Aug 05, 2012, at 11:50 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:

>I went with Barry's approach but made it compatible with PEP 8 (bad, FLUFL;
>no unneeded parens!).

I actually think I picked that up from the big guy himself, but I could be
misremembering. ;)