[Python-Dev] [PEP 558] thinking through locals() semantics

[Greg Ewing]

Nick Coghlan wrote:
> If there was a compelling use case for letting "a = 1; exec(src);
> print(a)" print something other than "1" at function scope, then I'd
> be more amenable to the idea of the associated compatibility break and
> potential performance regression in other implementations.
> 
> However, there isn't any such use case - if there were, we wouldn't
> have deliberately changed the semantics from the old Python 2 ones to
> the current Python 3 ones in PEP 3100 [1].

I get the impression that was done because everyone involved
thought it wasn't worth the ugliness of maintaining all the
fast/locals swapping stuff, not because of any principle that
the current behaviour is right or better in any way.

Given a locals proxy object, it would be much easier to support
the old behaviour (which seems obvious and correct to me) without
eval or exec having to be anything special.

-- 
Greg