Question

What I essentially need is a mutable integer which can accomplish the equivalent of the below without having to resort to using single element lists.

Below is a contrived code sample which is representative of the essence of my actual use case [1]

>>> a = [5]  
>>> b = [77]  
>>> def swap(num1, num2):  
...     temp = num1[0]  
...     num1[0] = num2[0]  
...     num2[0] = temp  
>>> swap(a, b)  
>>> a  
[77]  
>>> b  
[5]  

[1] My actual use case is closer to this ->
Returning a value after calling a function with a button in Tkinter
I need to return a value from a callback function associated with a Tkinter widget, and I would like to avoid globals.

Answer 1

Based on the comments, your goal is to get back the return status of a function that you don’t call directly, and you want to avoid globals. In C you’d have no choice but to use a reference, but in python you have much more flexibility than just locals and (C-style) globals: You can use “closures” to let your callback assign to a local variable directly.

In Python 3

If you use python 3, you can do this straightforwardly with the nonlocal keyword. The simplest case is when you define your callback on the spot:

myfunction():
    x = None
    def callback():
        nonlocal x    # Python 3 only 
        x = 5

    gtk.somefunction(callback)  # Executes callback()
    print "My callback returned", x

But your callback is probably defined elsewhere, or called from lots of different places? No problem, just define on the spot a wrapper that captures the return value of the real callback:

def real_callback():
    return 11

def myfunction():
    x = 0 

    def wrapper():
        nonlocal x     # Python 3 only
        x = real_callback()

    gtk.somefunction(wrapper)
    print "my callback returned", x

This can be obscured by turning wrapper into decorator, but that’s a different matter.

Python 2 solution

In python 2 there’s no nonlocal statement, and implicit closures are read-only: If you try the above without the nonlocal statement, you get an error. You can assign to a variable if you declare it global, and that’s all. So, some trickery is necessary:

First, the function locals() returns a dictionary with all the variables of the local context. locals()['x'] is the local variable x. But locals() is normally read-only. Fortunately there’s a nice (or terrible) work-around: For its own reasons, exec disables the optimization that renders locals() read-only… and, it turns out, it stays disabled for the lifetime of the calling function! (Tested on Python 2.6.6, YMMV. If it doesn’t work, try exec "a = 0" instead). So, you can do it like this:

def wrapper(callback, context, varname):
    def _callback():
        context[varname] = callback()
    return _callback

def mycode():
    exec ""
    some_library_function(wrapper(real_callback, locals(), 'z'))
    print "The callback returned", z

Is this preferable to just using a mutable container for your return value? That’s a matter of taste, I guess. But you can use the same wrapper any number of times, so in a sense it’s cleaner than the python 3 solution… if you ignore the magic exec.