On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:24 AM, Armin Rigo arigo@tunes.org wrote:
This discussion is mistakenly focused on locals(). There is a direct way to have arbitrary keys in the dict of a type:
MyClass = type('MyClass', (Base,), {42: 64}) MyClass.__dict__[42]
64
There is, however, no way to modify or add non-string keys in the type after its creation. So the question is whether the type() constructor is allowed to fail with a TypeError when the initial dict contains non-string keys (this is PyPy's current behavior).
The intention was for these dicts to be used as namespaces. I think of it as follows:
(a) Using non-string keys is a no-no, but the implementation isn't required to go out of its way to forbid it.
(b) Using non-empty string keys that aren't well-formed identifiers should be allowed.