%time magic funtion prevents variable assigment when used in function

[jurgispods]

I'm using IPython version 7.27. The following code snippet throws a NameError: name 'variable' is not defined:

def test(msg):
    %time variable = msg
    print(variable)
    
test("moin")

The bug is similar to #11659 and #11813, but it seems to only occur when used inside a function body.

[MrMino]

I think %time is not supposed to run the code inside the local scope. It borrows it, sure, but I don't think it was ever supposed to modify it.

Whether %time should modify local scope aside, why would you want to benchmark a variable assignment? The compile time of this line alone takes longer than the actual execution of it.

[jurgispods]

Oh, this is just a minimal example. In fact I was using it more like this:

def my_func():
    %time model = train_model()
    %time eval_model(model)

This might not be the way it was intended to be used.

[MrMino]

Have you tried using it as a cell magic?

In [1]: %%time
   ...:   x = 123
   ...:   print(x)
   ...: 
123
CPU times: user 170 µs, sys: 9 µs, total: 179 µs
Wall time: 191 µs

This might not be the way it was intended to be used.

Yea, it seems so. I haven't seen any cell / line magic modifying current scope. Might be a helpful feature though, let's leave the issue open for it.