class derived from dict in eval

[Andrew Dalke]

Alex:
> Wow -- heroic, really...

Naah, more like stubborn.  ;)

> Hmmm, one architectural one, I think -- what happens if
> d is, say, {'a': 23}, while s is, say, '{}["a"]', which
> SHOULD raise a KeyError?  I think this will loop forever...

In the context from which this is done, that cannot happen
because I haven't documented that {} is valid.  *ahem*

OTOH, your code would be tricky because I do have a
reference to 'math', so people can do math.abs().  The co_names
solution yields

>>> compile("math.abs(c)", "<string>", "eval")
<code object ? at 014BD900, file "<string>", line -1>
>>> _.co_names
('math', 'abs', 'c')
>>>

Hmmm...  it's theoretically possible that my dict-like object
defines an 'abs' which takes a long time to compute, so that a
possible workaround like

  for name in co_names:
    try:
        real_d = d[name]
    except KeyError:
        pass
  eval(compiled, real_d)

would trigger computing an 'abs' when it shouldn't.  I say
theoretically because all of the names used should be all
caps, possibly with an "_", but that's not prohibited.

So what I think I'll do is just add your double check and leave
my code as it is.

> You're welcome!  I'm slightly surprised I didn't already
> post this kind code in the past, put it in the cookbook,
> or something like that, but some googling suggests I didn't.

Feel free to add my trick with your fix - it might be useful for
a few cases.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com