Why is FLAGS necessary?

source url: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43437590/why-is-flags-necessary

Usually FLAGS are used to pass command line arguments into your program. E.g.

import tensorflow as tf
fs = tf.app.flags
fs.DEFINE_integer('n_epochs', 25, 'number of epochs to train [25]')
FLAGS = fs.FLAGS

def main(argv):
    print(FLAGS.n_epochs)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    tf.app.run()

If you run this snippet from the command line as python snippet.py, it will print

25

If you run python snippet.py --n_epochs 50 it will print

50

You could achieve the same thing with python's package argparse.

In the example you posted the use of FLAGS is admittedly a bit strange. Here it could be replaced by just directly defining the variables, unless the FLAGS variable is used someplace else in the code, which you are not showing here.