There’s some pretty nasty* things you can do with Python, if you really try. Here’s one that I came across today on the testing-in-python list. Turns out you can programmatically access the call stack. Here’s an example:

>>> def foo():
...   name = "Kevin"
...   bar()
... 
>>> foo()
Hello, Kevin

You have to ask what kind of evil person would write such an unmaintainable piece of code. I found it sufficiently fascinating though, that I figured I’d share. If you ever decide to use something like this in production… well, I’ll leave that to you and your conscience.

>>> def bar():
...   print "Hello,", sys._getframe(1).f_locals['name']

* nasty: unmaintainable, confusing, unobvious.