in reply to Re^2: I failed today
in thread I failed today

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?

Of course not.

Whereas Perl reminds us all the time that accepting unchecked user input is bad practice. And, god forbid, eval()'ing unchecked user input is criminal, Python decides to name the input+eval function input() and the sane just-input function as ... raw_input(). Why penalise the sane and common practice with more keystrokes? But you are right that reading the documentaton is key to avoid input() misbeheaving and fall in this trap.

In Section Meditations