The Python Apprentice

The global keyword

To avoid this shadowing of names in the global scope, we need to instruct Python to resolve the name count in the set_count() function to the count defined in the module namespace. We can do this by using the global keyword. Let's modify set_count() to do so:

def set_count(c):    global count    count = c

The global keyword simply introduces a binding in the local scope to a name from the global scope.

Quit and restart the Python interpreter to exercise our revised module:

>>> from scopes import *>>> show_count()count =  0>>> set_count(5)>>> show_count()count =  5

It now demonstrates the required behaviour.