An idiom for code generation with exec

[eliben]

Hello,

In a Python program I'm writing I need to dynamically generate
functions[*] and store them in a dict. eval() can't work for me
because a function definition is a statement and not an expression, so
I'm using exec. At the moment I came up with the following to make it
work:

def build_func(args):
  code """def foo(...)..."""
  d = {}
  exec code in globals(), d
  return d['foo']

My question is, considering that I really need code generation[*] -
"is there a cleaner way to do this ?" Also, what happens if I replace
globals() by None ?
Additionally, I've found indentation to be a problem in such
constructs. Is there a workable way to indent the code at the level of
build_func, and not on column 0 ?

Thanks in advance
Eli

[*] I know that each time a code generation question comes up people
suggest that there's a better way to achieve this, without using exec,
eval, etc. But in my case, for reasons too long to fully lay out, I
really need to generate non-trivial functions with a lot of hard-coded
actions for performance. And there's no problem of security
whatsoever. If someone is very interested in the application, I will
elaborate more.