How safe is modifying locals()?

[Stefan Schwarzer]

Hi Paul

Paul Paterson wrote:
> This is a very interesting (and Pythonic) approach, thanks for 
> suggesting it! This is certainly what I would try to do if I were 
> writing the code from scratch. It may be possible to construct a 
> "namespace" type object which gets passed to the function.

I think the most common way to make a namespace in Python is

class my_namespace: pass
...
my_namespace.a = 'foo'
my_namespace.b = 'bar'

Such namespaces are very similar to dictionaries:

my_namespace = {}
...
my_namespace['a'] = 'foo'
my_namespace['b'] = 'bar'

but the first approach is a bit more readable.

If you need many containers, you could use:

class Container:
     pass

c1 = Container()
c2 = Container()
...
c1.foo = 'foo'
c2.foo = 'bar'

Of course, if you have a better name for your container, that's even
better. Think of Ian's Point example. :-)

Stefan