Derivative of string as a name of list or dictionary (or class?)

[Alex Martelli]

John Hunter wrote:
        ...
> of a class, what do you think of the following approach to
> manipulating globals, which I discovered doing a little more reading
> on this issue in the c.l.python archives.
> 
> name = 'seq'
> val = ['John', 'Hunter', 'was', 'here']
> globals()[name] = val
> print seq
> 
> globals()['print'] = 'Clobber?'
> print seq  #no clobber

You couldn't clobber print anyway (it's a keyword) -- the exec
would fail (noisily -- SyntaxError).  Here, you're failing
silently instead, in a sense.  When you clobber builtins,
they stay clobbered -- e.g., use your first stanza to trample
over name 'globals', and you'll see how well the 2nd one works.


Alex