[Python-Dev] Christmas Wishlist (original) (raw)

Jeff Epler jepler at unpythonic.net
Sun Dec 14 22:03:47 EST 2003

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 04:31:09PM -0500, Raymond Hettinger wrote:

I. eval() to accept custom mapping arguments for globals and locals. This makes it possible to write a smart getitem method for applications like spreadsheets or case-insensitive evaluation.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029770.html [and the rest of that thread]

A 3% slowdown in the common case was considered too big to allow a feature like this to be included. The slowdown might be smaller if the builtin module wasn't allowed to be anything but a dict instance, or might disappear if there were two versions of ceval.c were included, and one used PyObject_ APIs and the other used PyDict_ APIs (as long as only one was fighting for space in the cpu cache, main memory, etc)

Jeff

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