A.2 Patched functions

When Psyco starts, it replaces a few functions from the __builtin__ and sys modules with a version of its own. This trick fails if you made a copy of one of these functions elsewhere before Psyco has a chance to replace it, because the old copy will not behave properly in the presence of Psyco.

Built-in function Notes

globals
locals (1)
vars (1) when called with no argument
dir (1) when called with no argument
eval (1)(2) when called with a single argument
execfile (1) when called with a single argument
input (1)
sys._getframe (3)

Built-in function	Notes
globals
locals	(1)
vars	(1) when called with no argument
dir	(1) when called with no argument
eval	(1)(2) when called with a single argument
execfile	(1) when called with a single argument
input	(1)
sys._getframe	(3)

Notes:

(1): A function run by Psyco has no native locals dictionary. Psyco 1.3 and above can emulate it properly if a certain optimization (early dead variable deletion) is disabled. Psyco should turn off this optimization automatically for functions where it detects a call to one of the above built-in functions, but this detection is a guess over the function's bytecode. It means that certain indirect calls can be missed. If this occurs at run-time, a psyco.warning is issued and the emulated locals dictionary is empty.
(2): Note that it is common to find Python programs that use dynamic code evaluation for an effect that can be obtained by calling an ad-hoc built-in function instead. For example, eval('self.'+attr) is better written as getattr(self, attr) and exec 'import '+module is better written as __import__(module, globals(), locals(), []).
(3): Frames corresponding to Psyco-evaluated functions are incomplete, as described in section A.1.

Additionally, the exec statement is not supported yet, as seen in section A.3.