namespace hacking question

[Steve Howell]

On Sep 30, 10:07 am, kj <no.em... at please.post> wrote:
> This is a recurrent situation: I want to initialize a whole bunch
> of local variables in a uniform way, but after initialization, I
> need to do different things with the various variables.
>

I'm curious what a typical use case for this is.  It seems funny to
have variables that are initialized the same way, yet which are not in
a collection.

> What I end up doing is using a dict:
>
> d = dict()
> for v in ('spam', 'ham', 'eggs'):
>     d[v] = init(v)
>
> foo(d['spam'])
> bar(d['ham'])
> baz(d['eggs'])
>

If you really want to get vars into the local namespace after the
initialization step, you can do something like this:

spam, ham, eggs = [init(v) for v in ['spam', 'ham', 'eggs']]

It's certainly awkward and brittle, but it lets you trade off re-
typing init() and d[] for another type of lexical duplication.

I wonder if you are either a) trying too hard to work around harmless
duplication or b) dealing with a duplication smell that actually runs
deeper than namespace hacking can fix.