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