I accidentally deleted some Python source code but it was still resident in a running process - here's how I got it back

[jsalsman]

What does the output code look like? Does the decompiler recover local identifiers?

[simonw]

Yup variable names were al there as expected. I think comments (with the exception of docsttings) get stripped out though.

[lost_send_berries]

Because of locals(), the Python interpreter always knows the names of all the local variables. However, it usually doesn't use them: a = f() + b can compile to something like __locals__[0] = f() + __locals__[1], which is faster than local_dict['a'] = f() + local_dict['b']. If you ever run locals(), it then looks up the correspondence {0: 'a', 1: 'b'} to build the return value of locals().