Mapping operator tokens to special methods

[Steven Bethard]

jamesthiele.usenet at gmail.com wrote:
> I was starting to write a dictionary to map operator strings to their
> equivalent special methods such as:
> {
>   '+' : 'add',
>   '&' : 'and_'
> }
> 
> The idea is to build a simple interactive calculator.
> 
> and was wondering if there is already something like this builtin?
> 
> Or is there a better way to do what I want?

There's not already a mapping builtin, but you should definitely look at 
the operator module:

py> import operator
py> ops = {'+':operator.add, '&':operator.and_}
py> ops['+'](3, 2)
5
py> ops['&'](3, 2)
2

STeVe