limited python virtual machine (WAS: Another scripting language implemented into Python itself?)

[Steven Bethard]

Jack Diederich wrote:
> Yes, this comes up every couple months and there is only one answer:
> This is the job of the OS.
> Java largely succeeds at doing sandboxy things because it was written that 
> way from the ground up (to behave both like a program interpreter and an OS).
> Python the language was not, and the CPython interpreter definitely was not.
> 
> Search groups.google.com for previous discussions of this on c.l.py

Could you give some useful queries?  Every time I do this search, I get 
a few results, but never anything that really goes into the security 
holes in any depth.  (They're ususally something like -- "look, given 
object, I can get int" not "look, given object, I can get eval, 
__import__, etc.)

Steve