Why use "locals()"

[Carl Banks]

On Sep 15, 11:41 am, "Gabriel Genellina" <gagsl-... at yahoo.com.ar>
wrote:
> En Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:18:35 -0300, Sion Arrowsmith  
> <s... at viridian.paintbox> escribió:
>
> > Sean DiZazzo  <half.ital... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What I'm not clear about is under what circumstances locals() does
> > not produce the same result as vars() .
>
> py> help(vars)
> Help on built-in function vars in module __builtin__:
>
> vars(...)
>      vars([object]) -> dictionary
>
>      Without arguments, equivalent to locals().
>      With an argument, equivalent to object.__dict__.

Now *this* I would say is unPythonic: it's basically another obvious
way to do something with no additional benefits.

It'd be more useful (and less of a misnomer) if it would return an
object really repesenting the variable visibility at the current
scope, something like "globals().copy().update(locals())", while
taking care of edge cases like undeclared locals.


Carl Banks