My reading notes journal for Code Fellows
In programming, the scope Links to an external site. of a name defines the area of a program in which you can unambiguously access that name, such as variables, functions, objects, and so on. A name will only be visible to and accessible by the code in its scope. Several programming languages take advantage of scope for avoiding name collisions and unpredictable behaviors. Most commonly, you’ll distinguish two general scopes:
Global scope: The names that you define in this scope are available to all your code.
Local scope: The names that you define in this scope are only available or visible to the code within the scope.
Scope came about because early programming languages (like BASIC) only had global names. With this kind of name, any part of the program could modify any variable at any time, so maintaining and debugging large programs could become a real nightmare. To work with global names, you’d need to keep all the code in mind at the same time to know what the value of a given name is at any time. This was an important side-effect of not having scopes.
Some languages like Python use scope to avoid this kind of problem. When you use a language that implements scope, there’s no way for you to access all the variables in a program at all locations in that program. In this case, your ability to access a given name will depend on where you’ve defined that name.
The names in your programs will have the scope of the block of code in which you define them. When you can access the value of a given name from someplace in your code, you’ll say that the name is in scope. If you can’t access the name, then you’ll say that the name is out of scope.
Enclosing (or nonlocal) scope is a special scope that only exists for nested functions. If the local scope is an inner or nested function Links to an external site., then the enclosing scope is the scope of the outer or enclosing function. This scope contains the names that you define in the enclosing function. The names in the enclosing scope are visible from the code of the inner and enclosing functions.
Global (or module) scope is the top-most scope in a Python program, script, or module. This Python scope contains all of the names that you define at the top level of a program or a module. Names in this Python scope are visible from everywhere in your code.
Built-in scope is a special Python scope that’s created or loaded whenever you run a script Links to an external site. or open an interactive session. This scope contains names such as keywords Links to an external site., functions, exceptions Links to an external site., and other attributes that are built into Python. Names in this Python scope are also available from everywhere in your code. It’s automatically loaded by Python when you run a program or script.
The LEGB rule is a kind of name lookup procedure, which determines the order in which Python looks up names. For example, if you reference a given name, then Python will look that name up sequentially in the local, enclosing, global, and built-in scope. If the name exists, then you’ll get the first occurrence of it. Otherwise, you’ll get an error.
In summary, when you use nested functions, names are resolved by first checking the local scope or the innermost function’s local scope. Then, Python looks at all enclosing scopes of outer functions from the innermost scope to the outermost scope. If no match is found, then Python looks at the global and built-in scopes. If it can’t find the name, then you’ll get an error.
At any given time during execution, you’ll have at most four active Python scopes—local, enclosing, global, and built-in—depending on where you are in the code. On the other hand, you’ll always have at least two active scopes, which are the global and built-in scopes. These two scopes will always be available for you.
https://realpython.com/python-scope-legb-rule/