[Tutor] eval and exec

[Alan Gauld]

> dictionary of database instances, dbtables, keyed on table name,
> and I want a general way of creating variables with the name of
> the table so I'm not accessing the dictionary.  Would something
> like this work:
> 
> # dbtables is already built
> for table in dbtables.keys():
> exec("%s = dbtables['%s']" % (table, table))

It will create a lot of variables named after your tables.
The problem with this approach is how will the code that comes 
after this dynamic naming know about those names which don't 
exist when you wrote it? 

You can only access variables that you know exist, but if 
you know they will exist you don't need to do the dynamic 
naming thing...

So this approach is only useful where you know a lot of 
names in advance but don't want to go to the hassle of 
explicitly initialising them all before using them. The cost
of this small time saving is the use of a potentially 
dangerous exec call.

This kind of dynamic naming scheme is only really useful 
in some kind of interactive session, when you run a program 
thats written in advance it is much better to put dynamically 
created objects into a collection IMHO.

Alan g.