Embedding Python in Python

[Darryl]

JCM <joshway_without_spam at myway.com> wrote in message news:<bm1mt6$maa$1 at fred.mathworks.com>...
> (...) What we did was parse the users' code
> (take a look at the compiler module) and statically analyze it for
> anything "dangerous".

Ugh...I had considered this approach but was hoping I didn't have to
do it :) I've only been hacking Python for a couple weeks, so I don't
know all the ins and outs of what I'd need to watch for...in my
experience, most languages seem to have obscure ways of doing things
that you wouldn't think of normally, and Python seems no exception.
>From a more pragmatic perspective though, this is just a toy project,
so it's not too important if I miss something.

> (...) anything of the form __ident__

Now that's an interesting idea...from what I've seen of Python, that
should catch most of the really obscure ways of doing things. I
haven't looked, but I can only assume that Python has regexp matching
in it somewhere, so some of the simple checks should be only a few
lines of code. A blacklist of keywords seems like a good first start
(it's a fairly restrictive context, so even common things like def and
lambda can probably be blocked).

I also just tested and noticed that syntax errors seem to be thrown as
exceptions (rather than causing the interpreter to gasp and die), so I
shouldn't have to worry about a badly-written script crashing the
whole app.

Thanks for the input,
- Darryl