Question

I’m currently working on an experiment where I’m implementing an interpreter for an old in-game scripting language. It’s a forth based language, so I figure it would be fairly easy to just have the instructions (once verified and santized) put into a big list.

Once I’ve got the code in a list, I am trying to iterate through the entire program in a for loop that processes the instructions one at a time. Certain items, like strings, could be placed onto a variable that holds the current stack, which is easy enough. But where I’m stuck is making commands happen.

I have a big list of functions that are valid and I’d like it to where if any instruction matches them, it calls the associated function.

So, for example, if I had:

    "Hello, world!" notify

…the code would check for notify in a list and then execute the notify function. The bottom line is: How do I translate a string into a function name?

Answer 1

You could keep a dictionary of functions the code can call, and then do a look up when you need to:

def notify(s):
    print(s)

d = {"notify": notify}

d["notify"]("Hello, world!")