code blocks

[Peter Otten]

Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 1:22 AM, zipher <dreamingforward at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ah, yeah, I guess that does it.  But (shame) it looks like you've gone
>> past the BDFL.  Try:
>>
>>>>> help(exec)
>>             ^
>> SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>
> 
> That's because, in the version of Python you're using, exec is a
> keyword. You could switch to Python 3, where it's a function, or
> request it by name. Though interestingly, my Py2 doesn't have any help
> on exec:
> 
>>>> help('exec')
> no documentation found for 'exec'
> 
> Not sure why that is.

Path confusion? You may accidentally be importing Python 3's topics. 
Try

>>> from pydoc_data import topics
>>> topics.__file__
'/usr/lib/python2.7/pydoc_data/topics.pyc'
>>> "exec" in topics.topics
True
>>> help("exec")
The ``exec`` statement
[...]

>>> import sys
>>> sys.path.insert(0,  "/usr/lib/python3.4")
>>> del sys.modules["pydoc_data"]
>>> del sys.modules["pydoc_data.topics"]
>>> help("exec")
no documentation found for 'exec'