How Everything Became an Executable Statement

New users to Python are sometimes surprised to find out that every part of the language is an executable statement, including function and class definitions. That means that any statement can appear anywhere in a program. For instance, a function definition could appear inside an "if" statement if you wanted.

In a very early version of Python’s grammar, this was not the case: grammar elements that had a “declarative flavor”, like import statements and function definitions, were allowed only at the top level in a module or script (where they were being executed in order to become effective). However, at the time I was adding support for classes, I decided that this was too restrictive.

My reasoning went roughly as follows. Rather than defining the class body as a series of function declarations only, it seemed to make sense to also allow regular variable assignments there. However, if I was going to allow that, why not go one step further and allow arbitrary executable code? Or, taking this even further, why not allow function declarations inside an “if” statement, for example? It quickly became clear that this enabled a simplification of the grammar, since now all uses of statements (whether indented or not) could share the same grammar rule, and hence the compiler could use the same byte code generation function for all of them.

Although this reasoning allowed me to simplify the grammar and allowed users to place Python statements anywhere, this feature did not necessarily enable certain styles of programming. For example, the Python grammar technically allowed users to write things such as nested functions even though the underlying semantics of Python didn't support nested scopes. Therefore, code such as that would often operate in ways that were unexpected or "broken" compared to languages that were actually designed with such features in mind. Over time, many of these "broken" features have been fixed. For example, nested function definitions only began to work more sanely in Python 2.1.