Eh, I'm not sure why I even bother. You're only cheating yourself from the valuable learning experience.

My apologies for being rude.

within given constraints

The constraints were to not use functions such as eval, exec, compile, etc. You used ast.parse which, according to the Python documentation, is equivalent to a compile call. Ergo, you did not provide a solution within the constraints.

being called a cheater for being different is somewhat disappointing

Why so disappointed?

That's cheating! :(