[Python-ideas] Python hook just before NameError

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> I mainly did up this patch to see how hard it would be, and now it's
> turned out to be fairly simple, I'm curious as to whether it would
> actually be useful to people.
>
> At the point where a global/builtin name lookup is about to raise
> NameError, first try calling a Python function, along the same lines
> as __getattr__. If that function hasn't been defined, raise NameError
> as normal; but if it has, let it either raise NameError or return some
> object, which is then used as if the name had been bound to it.
>
> Patch is here:
> http://bugs.python.org/issue23126
>
> The idea is to allow convenient interactive use; auto-importing
> modules is easy, and importing names from modules ("exp" --> math.exp)
> can be done easily enough too, given a list of modules to try.
>
> It's probably not a good idea to use this in application code, and I
> definitely wouldn't encourage it in library code, but it has its uses
> interactively.

I find it weird that it's *really truly* global, instead of being
scoped to a single global namespace.

Random thoughts:

http://bugs.python.org/issue22986 enables a similar feature for module
attribute lookups, which is one substantial source of "global"
lookups. (Also it's been waiting for a review for some time,
*coughcough* ;-)).

If evaluating a specific piece of code, you can already pass an
arbitrary dict-like object as the globals argument to exec, with
whatever __getitem__ you want. Of course the built-in REPL doesn't
provide any way to set the interactive namespace's globals object, but
it could, or it'd be easy to implement in a REPL like IPython.

You could achieve a similar effect by assigning a custom object to the
interactive namespace's __builtins__ variable.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith
Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh
http://vorpus.org