Question

Is it possible to declare a variable in Python, like so?:

var 

so that it initialized to None? It seems like Python allows this, but as soon as you access it, it crashes. Is this possible? If not, why?

EDIT: I want to do this for cases like this:

value  for index in sequence:     if value == None and conditionMet:        value = index        break 

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Answer 1

Why not just do this:

var = None 

Python is dynamic, so you don’t need to declare things; they exist automatically in the first scope where they’re assigned. So, all you need is a regular old assignment statement as above.

This is nice, because you’ll never end up with an uninitialized variable. But be careful — this doesn’t mean that you won’t end up with incorrectly initialized variables. If you init something to None, make sure that’s what you really want, and assign something more meaningful if you can.