[Python-Dev] bug or a feature? (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Jun 12 12:06:32 CEST 2008

At 02:59 AM 6/12/2008 +0200, Maciej Fijalkowski wrote:

It's about abusing locals, which are not even given that they'll modify this dict.

Note that class bodies are a special case: as of PEP 3115, it's possible for a class body's locals to be a non-dictionary object, so it makes no sense to make a class body's locals() or f_locals return some other object.

Meanwhile, as a practicality-beats-purity matter, you're going to run into compatibility problems with a fair number of libraries in the field (including Zope and Twisted, and anything using them) if you don't support locals() modification in class bodies. (Those other libraries don't use non-string keys like AddOns does, but they do depend on modifying a class body's frame locals.)

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