Self-modifying Python code to keep track of high scores

Question

I've considered storing the high scores for my game as variables in the code itself rather than as a text file as I've done so far because it means less additional files are required to run it and that attributing 999999 points becomes harder.

However, this would then require me to run self-modifying code to overwrite the global variables representing the scores permanently. I looked into that and considering that all I want to do is really just to change global variables, all the stuff I found was too advanced.

I'd appreciate if someone could give me an explanation on how to write self-modifying Python code to do just that, preferably with an example too as it aids understanding.

Answer 1

My first inclination is to say "don't do that". Self-modifying Python (really any language) makes it extremely difficult to maintain a versioned library.

1. You make a bug fix and need to redistribute - how do you merge data you stored via self-modification.
2. Very hard to authenticate packaging using a hash - once the local version is modified it's hard to tell which version it originated because SHAs won't match.
3. It's unsafe - You could just save and load a Python class that's not stored with your package, however, if it's user writable, a foreign process could add any arbitrary Python code to that file to evaluate. Kind of like SQL injection but Python style.

Python makes is so trivial to load and dump JSON files, that for simple things, I wouldn't think of anything else. Even CSV files are trivial and can be bound to maps but can be more easily manipulated as data using your favorite spreadsheet editor.

My suggestion - don't use self-modifiying Python unless you're just wanting to experiment; It's just not a practical solution in the real world, unless you're working in an embedded environment where disk and memory are a premium.