This question already has answers here:
Closed 4 years ago.
I am trying to change global value x
from within another functions scope as the following code shows,
x = 1
def add_one(x):
x += 1
then I execute the sequence of statements on Python's interactive terminal as follows.
>>> x
1
>>> x += 1
>>> x
2
>>> add_one(x)
>>> x
2
Why is x
still 2 and not 3?
Because x
is a local (all function arguments are), not a global, and integers are not mutable.
So x += 1
is the same as x = x + 1
, producing a new integer object, and x
is rebound to that.
You can mark x
a global in the function:
def add_one():
global x
x += 1
There is no point in passing in x
as an argument here.