where is upvar

[Fredrik Lundh]

Darren New wrote:
> > No, by far uglier, and unpublished, i mean, it's really not pretty.
> > Does Smalltalk do something like that? Never heard of such a
> > feature.
> 
> Yes. It's how the debugger works. Smalltalk stack frames are objects just
> like everything else.

So are Python stack frames, of course.

But that's an implementation detail, and you need to use
some slightly weird tricks to access them...

import sys

def egg():
    # get caller's namespace
    try:
        raise None
    except:
        frame = sys.exc_traceback.tb_frame.f_back
    print frame.f_globals
    print frame.f_locals
    frame.f_locals["a"] = 1
    frame.f_locals["b"] = 2

def spam():
    a = 0
    c = 3
    egg()
    print locals()
    print b # this will fail

spam()

...and even when you do know the tricks, things don't really
work as you might expect:

$ python example.py

{'spam': <function spam at 007C261C>, 'sys': <module 'sys' (built-in)>, '__doc__
': None, 'egg': <function egg at 007C25BC>, '__name__': '__main__', '__builtins_
_': <module '__builtin__' (built-in)>}
{'c': 3, 'a': 0}
{'b': 2, 'c': 3, 'a': 0}
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "q.py", line 21, in ?
    spam()
  File "q.py", line 19, in spam
    print b
NameError: There is no variable named 'b'

(if you don't understand what's going on here, see "Code blocks,
execution frames, and namespaces" in the language reference)

</F>