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Any way for a function to refer to itself?

Joshua Marshall jmarshal at mathworks.com
Thu Feb 22 15:22:16 EST 2001 
Joshua Marshall <jmarshal at mathworks.com> wrote:
> Lee, Rick <rickylee at americasm01.nt.com> wrote:
>> I can't find any other way for a function or method to refer to itself
>> than something like the following:

>> def foo():
>>     myself = foo   # only if foo is global
>>     mydoc = myself.__doc__
>>     myname = myself.__name__

>> So it can be done this way, but:

>> - only if the function name can actually be accessed from the current
>> name space
>> - if the function name changes, that first line inside this function
>> also has to change

>> Seems to me there should be a more "Pythonic" way of doing this.  Is
>> there?

> It might be unpleasant, but you can do something like:

>   def fib(f, x):
>      if x < 2: return 1
>      return f(f, x-1) + f(f, x-2)

>   print fib(fib, 10)

And I guess if you don't like the idea of always having to pass your
function in to itself, you can wrap it:

  def fib(x):
     def _fib(f, x):
        if x < 2: return 1
        return f(f, x-1) + f(f, x-2)
     return _fib(_fib, x)

  print fib(10)
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