Problem of Using Eval

[hkfwy]

Hi,

I'm using Python 3.1, and got some confusion when using eval. The code is in the following

from datetime import date

globalDict = dict()
globalDict['today'] = date.today
globalDict['date'] = date
globalDict['__builtins__'] = None
#date.today()
funName = input('please input the function name: ')
result = eval(funName, globalDict)
print("The result is: ", result)

After executing the above code, I got the following information:

please input the function name: date.today()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test.py", line 16, in <module>
result = eval(funName, globalDict)
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '__import__'

However, if I uncommented the line '#date.today()', the program worked and printed the date of today. Another issue making me confused is if I leave the line 'date.today()' uncommented and remove the item <'today': <built-in method today of type object at 0x6ac> from the dictionary, it will also work. To my understanding, eval will find the name appearing in the expression in the provided dictionary. If that name is not defined in the dictionary, an error will be raised. But there is no error after I removed 'today' from dictionary.

Does anyone have any idea about this?

Thank you!