On 10/1/2014 12:00 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Out of curiosity, I ran:
globals().clear()
in the interactive interpreter. It broke much more than I expected!
Built-ins were no longer available, and import stopped working.
As you discovered, this reduces the interpreter to a pure syntax machine
with no name bindings -- sort of like a high-level assembler with no
access to a function library.
I expected that global variables would be all lost, but built-ins would
remain, since they don't live in the global namespace. ...
The reason, I think, is that CPython has a special __builtins__ global
variable that the interpreter uses to access built-in functions.
When executing statements from Shell, Idle restores __builtins__.
>>> globals().clear()
>>> print(dir())
['__builtins__']
>>> print(__builtins__)
<long listing>
The odd thing is that executing the same code from a file prints [] and
then raises "NameError: name '__builtins__' is not defined".
Well that's okay, I thought to myself, I'll just import the built-in
functions:
from builtins import len # use '__builtin__' in Python 2
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: __import__ not found
Most keyword statements are implemented by internal functions not
accessible from Python except through the statement syntax. Import is
an exception. This is one of the hooks that allow the behavior of
imports to be modified. The result is like, for instance, programming
in C with 'include' disabled.
Oops.
So, with no built-ins available, import no longer works. That makes things
rather tricky.
Obviously the easiest way to recover is to exit the current session and
restart it, but as a challenge, can we recover from this state?
--
Terry Jan Reedy
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
