function to store in caller's context

[Skaperen]

that aspect of locals() is why i haven't used it to modify them in any serious way. i have tried to modify them and it does seem to work. but there could be cases where it doesn't work, ranging from the old value remains to a segfault of the engine or undetected data corruption, and numerous cases in between such how you explained it. compiled code could be caching recently accessed or correctly modified values. since it seems to allow read/fetch access from the dictionary, that suggests to me that the compiled code is expected to store these values.