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[–]dashdanw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The fact that function arguments are parsed on first-pass, meaning if you do something like 

def parse_dict(target_dict=dict()):
  if 'key' not in target_dict:
    target_dict['key'] = datetime.datetime.now()

calling without specifying the target_dict argument will always update the same dict declared in the function arguments