function local namespace question

[Paul LaFollette]

Kind people,

Using Python 3.1 under FreeBSD and WinXP.

I've been tearing my hair out trying to solve this myself, but I need
to ask for help.   I want (for obscure reasons) to be able to log
transactions in the namespace(s) of a script.  Specifically I would
like to log creation of identifiers, changes in the binding of
identifiers ("assignment") and lookups.  This turns out to be pretty
easy in the global and local namespaces... I simply subclass dict,
override the appropriate operations to include the logging operations
I want, and then exec the code using my dictionaries as the global and
local namespaces.  All  of this  works just dandy until I try to
extend it to functions.

I cannot figure out any way to get a hook into the local namespace of
a user defined function.  I have tried making a wrapper class that
grabs the function call and then uses exec to invoke
myfunction.__code__ with my own dictionaries.  This runs the (no
argument) function properly (losing the return value, but I can deal
with that) but never accesses the local logging dictionary that I
specify in the exec() call. Perhaps the local namespace of a function
is not a dict at all?

Anyway, is there any way (however clumsy) to do what I want to do?
Thank you for your help.
Paul

---------------------------
Paul LaFollette
CIS Department
Temple University
paul.lafollette(at)temple.edu
www.cis.temple.edu/~lafollet