I'm no fan of Python myself, but as most of us have seen Perl (mis-)features or improper usage used as examples of why not to use Perl, I feel someone should be intellectually honest enough to call the same when applied elsewere. In the example given, this is the use of a poorly-named feature that somehow survived in versions of Python prior to the 3.x series.

In the 2.7.18 documentation, it says that input([prompt]) is the equivalent of eval(raw_input([prompt])), and to consider using the raw_input() function for general input from users. Their eval() is similar to our string eval() function, so I ask the question -- If you were writing a Perl script and accepting credentials, can you think of a valid reason to pass the user's input immediately through a string eval? (If you're writing a program that needs to be security-conscious, I expect some thought on the functions one calls, and honest research when testing shows something misbehaving (it was tested, right?).)