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The stupidity of 'id' as a variable name (or stupidity of me)
16th of September 2008
Both in Zope2 and in Django you need to work with attributes called id. This is a shame since it's such a huge pitfall. Despite having done Python programming for so many years I today fell into this pitfall twice!! The pitfall is that id is a builtin function, not a suitable variable name. The reason is that I was changing a complex app to use something called the UUID as the indentifier instead of the ID which happened to be a name of a primary key in a table.
This meant lots of changes and I tested and tested and kept getting really strange errors. I took the whole thing apart and put it back together when I discovered my error of checking if variable id was set or not. id, if undefined, defaults to the builtin function id() which will always return true on bool(id).
It's been a long day. I'm going home. Two newbie mistakes in one programming session. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been trapped by this.
Comment
this is also common in wxPython, i only realised this was an issue after running one of my programs through pylint, which flags up something like 'using builtin function id', so i'm now also using id_
I've done that a lot too, now I just use id_ as the variable name.
I've changed most places to 'oid' as in "object ID".