Question

I am writing a script and I have a function, call it f(), that needs one of the command line arguments (a filename it needs to open). However, f() is not called directly in the main function.

I was wondering if it was bad coding convention to call sys.argv[1] straight from f()? If I don’t I would have to pass it as an argument to all of the functions that eventually call f().

Answer 1

It would be a bad practice to always assume that the arguments that your function needs are available on the command-line – what if this code was invoked in some other manner?

A function should declare input parameters for the data it needs to access.

At the very least, passing the necessary argument into f() rather than accessing sys.argv helps make f() much more re-usable.