Dave Angel wrote:
For that, I'd suggest reserving a directory at a known location, doing an os.path.dirname() on that directory, and building a list of module names. Then use __import__() to load them, and build a list of module objects, and a list of classes in those modules. Suggest classname to be simply formed by uppercasing the first letter of the module file.
Another possibility would be to require each student's module to define a factory function with a standard name, such as 'create_strategy', so you wouldn't have to deal with a different class name in each module. Also, an alternative to using __import__() would be to use execfile() to load and execute the student's code. Then you wouldn't have to put the directory containing the students' modules on the import path, and they wouldn't get put into sys.modules, which would help to isolate them from each other. (Otherwise a student could cheat by importing someone else's stragegy class and passing it off as their own!) However, each student's submission would more or less be restricted to a single file in that case, whereas using __import__() would allow it to be a package with submodules. Whether that's a serious disadvantage depends on how big and complicated you expect the submissions to be. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
