Is this a safe use of eval?

[Frank Millman]

"Christian Heimes" <lists at cheimes.de> wrote
> Am 24.02.2011 10:01, schrieb Peter Otten:
>> How do you prevent that a malicious source sends you
>>
>> my_string = 'calc_area(__import__("os").system("rm important_file") or 
>> 100,
>> 200)'
>>
>> instead?
>
> By using something like
> http://code.activestate.com/recipes/496746-restricted-safe-eval/ . With
> a combination of AST inspection and restricted builtins you can create a
> restricted eval function that e.g. doesn't allow function calls, raising
> or excepting exceptions and prevents access to members with a leading _.
>

Thanks, Christian. I had a look at that recipe, but I must say that Paul's 
suggestion is much simpler -

   from ast import literal_eval
   method_name = 'calc_area'
   args = literal_eval('(100,200)')
   result = getattr(my_inst, method_name)(*args)

In my case the arguments are all strings or integers, so it looks as if this 
approach should be safe. Do you see any problem with it?

Frank