[Python-Dev] Christmas Wishlist

[Raymond Hettinger]

> 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