dynamic assigments

[Michael Torrie]

On 03/25/2011 06:29 AM, Seldon wrote:
> Because I'm in this situation.  My current code is of the form:
> 
> var1 = func(arg=value1, *args)
> ..
> varn = func(arg=valuen, *args)
> 
> where var1,..varn are variable names I know in advance and 
> value1,..valuen are objects known in advance, too; func is a long 
> invocation to a factory function.  Each invocation differs only for the 
> value of the 'arg' argument, so I have a lot of boilerplate code I'd 
> prefer to get rid of (for readability reasons).
> 
> I thought to refactor the code in a more declarative way, like
> 
> assignment_list = (
> ('var1', value1),
> ('var2', value2),
> .. ,
> )
> 
> for (variable, value) in assignment_list:
> 	locals()[variable] = func(arg=value, *args)
> 
> My question is: what's possibly wrong with respect to this approach ?

Wouldn't it be easiest just to keep the variables in a dictionary or
something, and then refer to them by key?

funcs = {}
for (variable, value) in assignment_list:
    funcs[variable] = func(arg=value, *args)

print funcs['var1']

There doesn't seem to be any benefit to having things in the python
namespace when for your purposes a dictionary would work very cleanly.