artificial intelligence - How do you get Python to write down the code of a function it has in memory?

Question

When I pass the options in the program (a computational biology experiment) I usually pass them through a .py file.
So I have this .py file that reads like:

starting_length=9
starting_cell_size=1000
LengthofExperiments=5000000

Then I execute the file and get the data. Since the program is all on my machine and no one else has access to it, it is secure in a trivial way.
I can also write a similar file very easily:

def writeoptions(directory):
    options=""
    options+="starting_length=%s%s"%(starting_length,os.linesep)
    options+="starting_cell_size=%s%s"%(starting_cell_size,os.linesep)
    options+="LengthofExperiments=%s%s"%(LengthofExperiments,os.linesep)
...
    open("%s%soptions.py"%(directory,os.sep),'w').write(options)

I want to pass a function as one of the parameters:

starting_length=9
starting_cell_size=1000
LengthofExperiments=5000000

def pippo(a,b):
    return a+b
functionoperator=pippo

And of course in the real experiment the function pippo will be much more complex. And different from experiment to experiment.

But what I am unable to do is to write the function automatically. In short I don't know how to generalise the writeoptions function to keep on writing the options, if one of the options is a function. I could of course copy the original file, but this is inelegant, inefficient (because it contains a lot of extra options that are not being used), and generally does not solve the question.

How do you get python to write down the code of a function, as it writes down the value of a variable?

Answer 1

vinko@mithril$ more a.py

def foo(a):
  print a

vinko@mithril$ more b.py

import a
import inspect

a.foo(89)
print inspect.getsource(a.foo)

vinko@mithril$ python b.py
89
def foo(a):
  print a