On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:58:38 -0800, Luis M. González wrote: > I wonder why updating locals(), not from within a function, works (at > least in my interactive session).
Because if you're in the global scope, locals() returns globals(), which is a real namespace and modifying it works. Inside a function, locals() returns a dict which is a *copy* of the function namespace. The reason for this is that local namespaces are not actually dicts, and you can't modify them except by actually assigning and deleting names in code. > And what about the trick of updating globals? Is it legal? If not, is > there any "legal" way to do what the OP needs? Yes, it is legal to modify globals(). It's just a dict, you can even do this: >>> globals()[2] = 4 >>> globals()[2] 4 although that's a pretty useless trick. But whether you should is another story. I won't say you should NEVER do so, but it should be rare to use global variables, and even rarer to create them programmatically. The better solution is almost always to create your own namespace, namely a dict, and use that explicitly. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
