On Mar 24, 10:51 pm, scattered <tooscatte...@gmail.com> wrote: [snip]
> I can easily imagine other > situations in which a user might want to create a large number of > bindings for interactive use. Maybe as a teacher (I'm a math teacher) > you have written a student-class which contains things like methods to > compute averages, return lists of missing assignments, etc. At the > prompt you run a script that creates a binding for each student in a > section to a student object so that you can just type something like > JohnDoe.missing() to get a list of their missing assignments. Just > because exec() *can* be misused doesn't mean that there aren't valid > uses for it. You would be foolish to run exec() on unparsed externally > supplied data - but perhaps you are running it on data that you > yourself have generated. > I think I might actually implement the above. A quick experiment with IDLE's Python shell shows that an assigment generated by exec() is immediately usable with autocomplete. Many of my students have weird names like Victor Jarinski (a made-up but not untypical example). Typing in average["Victor Jarinski"] for a dictionary look-up requires a fair amount of typing, but if I have a top-level binding I can just type Vic and then invoke auto-complete to get to VictorJarinski.average() with a fraction of the key-strokes. -scattered -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list