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

Raymond Hettinger python at rcn.com
Mon Dec 15 14:26:03 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]

[Jeff Epler]

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)

Ordinarily, I would say that 3% is a reasonable price to pay for this functionality but there is that pesky pie throwing event coming up.

Raymond Hettinger

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