You CAN get access to the calling scope of a function. Something like:

    current_frame = inspect.currentframe()
    env = current_frame.f_back.f_locals.copy()

I did it in uplaybook so that you can do things like:

    for module in ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']:
        ln(path="/etc/apache2/mods-enabled", src="/etc/apache2/mods-available/{{ module }}.load")

This is an ansible-like tooling with a python instead of YAML syntax, hence the Jinja2 templating.