Feature request: String-inferred names

[Terry Reedy]

Brad Harms wrote:

> Well, yes, the names would have to be determined at run time. That's 
> what getattr and setattr do, except that that do it in the context of an 
> object rather than the local scope. However, I was under the impression 
> that python's mechanism for looking up local names was the same as the 
> mechanism used to look up attributes because names and attributes seem 
> to function pretty much the same way. This I assumed because of the 
> functionality of the locals() and globals() functions, which seem to act 
> like the __dict__ attribute on objects except that the work on the 
> current scope.

The definition of locals() allows it to just be a dict *copy* of the 
local namespace, rather than the local namespace itself. Within 
functions, (at least for CPython, and probably for other 
implementations), locals() is just a copy, and changes to locals() are 
*not* propagated back to the local namespace. Within functions, local 
name 'lookup' has nothing to do with dict lookup. (It is more like list 
indexing.)