On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Steven D'Aprano
I think that having literal_eval support non-literals is a bad, bad idea. Let's just not go there. It will surely end in tears.
However, I think that having something in between the strictness of literal_eval and the dangerous "anything goes" power of eval is a good idea. For a long time now I've toyed with an engine for building expression evaluators. Something that understands operators, function calls, etc, and you can tell it what names to accept. My main motivation is for evaluating mathematical expressions like:
5x^3 - 2x + log(1/y) + n!/√π
This sounds like a good idea, especially if there can be some way to enforce that these names may ONLY be called - you can't piggyback on log to get other functionality with log.__globals__ etc. That would cover frozenset quite happily. ChrisA