problem with exec and locals()

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:51:39 -0300, Uwe Schmitt  
<rocksportrocker at googlemail.com> escribi�:

> On 1 Jul., 15:15, Mel <mwil... at the-wire.com> wrote:
>> rocksportrockerwrote:
>>
>> > the following code does not work until I ommit the "a=0" statement.
>>
>> >    def test():
>> >        exec "a=3" in locals()
>> >        print a
>> >        a=0
>>
>> >     test()
>>
>> > print raises:
>> >      UnboundLocalError: local variable 'a' referenced before
>> > assignment
>>
>> > Can anybody explain what is going wrong here ?
>>
>> AFAIK, local variables are implemented rather like __slots__ in  
>> new-style
>> classes.  This is a very valuable efficiency measure, but it can cause  
>> this
>> kind of trouble.  Without `a=0`, the bytecode compiler makes no slot  
>> for a,
>
> Thanks for your answer. I wonder if this is a bug, or did I miss
> something
> in the docs ???

Read the warnings in the docs for the locals() builtin function:
http://docs.python.org/lib/built-in-funcs.html#l2h-47
and the execfile function:
http://docs.python.org/lib/built-in-funcs.html#l2h-26

-- 
Gabriel Genellina