my god, I've created a monster! Maybe I should restate my original problem. Actually, the word 'problem' is too strong. I had a little curiosity about whether I could write a couple of lines of code more succinctly, or more pythonically. I didn't realize that this would trigger a discussion about mixing data and objects - though I can see the danger if you get into some situations. Hopefully mine is not one of those.
Restating: I'm doing some debugging of some code. I want to print out the value of two variables whose names are known. Let's call them myTime and myPlace. #debug: if self.debug: print "myTime = %s, myPlace = %s" % (myTime, myPlace) Notice that I had to type the variable's name once as an object, and once as the string representation of that object, i.e. the object's name. I wondered whether it might not be possible to do something like this: if self.debug: print "%s = %s" % ( name(myTime), myTime ) where 'name' is the method or trick I'm after. Creating a dictionary is already more work than it's worth, not to mention some of the more involved solutions. I'm left to conclude that it's not possible to do what I wanted with Python. If that's the case, so be it and I'll move on to explore other curiosities. But surely if you create an integer object and assign it a value, e.g. a = 3, why shouldn't Python be able to tell you something like the following: name(a) >>> 'a' ? thanks S -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
