Having poked around a little bit, I found it's not simple to get at the contents of a cell object from Python. It's not the sort of thing that one needs to be doing very frequently, but I've run into a few situations recently where it would be really useful from a debugging standpoint. You can get at a cell object containing a given value by making a quick closure and looking at the func_closure attribute: (lambda x: lambda: x)(some_value).func_closure[0] but there's not anything we can easily do with that object to find out what it's pointing at. The str() representation only tells us the id of the contained value. This trivial patch creates a "value()" method for cell objects that returns a new reference to the contained object, for introspection purposes. I should mention it's not the only way to accomplish this; you can also get at the contents of a cell by creating a new function from a code object and manufacturing its func_closures tuple from the cell you already have: def get_cell_value(cell): return type(lambda: 0)( (lambda x: lambda: x)(0).func_code, {}, None, None, (cell,) )() ..but that's non-obvious and not particularly convenient.
Logged In: YES user_id=4771 I guess this can be safely sneaked in 2.5, as cells are quite undocumented internal objects anyway. I believe it would be more natural to access the value as an attribute "c.value", though. (Possibly even a read-write attribute?) Probably not in 2.4, though; there is a no-new-feature policy.
Logged In: YES user_id=31435 Jeremy, I vaguely recall that you deliberately made cell objects non-inspectable. Is that right? If so and you still care about that, note that it's no longer true.
