Given an ast node that can be evaluated by itself, but is not literal enough for ast.literal_eval e.g. a list comprehension

src = '[i**2 for i in range(10)]'
a = ast.parse(src)

Now a.body[0] is an ast.Expr and a.body[0].value an ast.ListComp. I would like to obtain the list that eval(src) would result, but given only the ast.Expr node.

Perhaps you're looking for compile()? The result of calling compile() on an AST object is a code object that can be passed to eval().

>>> src = '[i**2 for i in range(10)]'
>>> b = ast.parse(src, mode='eval')
>>> eval(compile(b, '', 'eval'))
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]