What are the common programming mistakes in Python?
- by Paul McGuire
I was about to tag the recent question in which the OP accidentally shadowed the builtin operator module with his own local operator.py with the "common-mistakes" tag, and I saw that there are a number of interesting questions posted asking for common mistakes to avoid in Java, Ruby, Scala, Clojure, .Net, jQuery, Haskell, SQL, ColdFusion, and so on, but I didn't see any for Python.
For the benefit of Python beginners, can we enumerate the common mistakes that we have all committed at one time or another, in the hopes of maybe steering a newbie or two clear of them? (In homage to "The Princess Bride", I call these the Classic Blunders.) If possible, a little supporting explanation on what the problem is, and the generally accepted resolution/workaround, so that the beginning Pythoner doesn't read your answer and say "ok, that's a mistake, how do I fix it?"
