[Python-Dev] Capabilities (original) (raw)

Ka-Ping Yee ping@zesty.ca
Mon, 10 Mar 2003 05:14:24 -0600 (CST)

On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Guido van Rossum wrote:

- Which attributes are considered introspective?

Here's a preliminary description of the boundary between "introspective" and "restricted", off the top of my head:

1.  The only thing you can do with a bound method is to call it
    (bound methods have no attributes except __doc__).

2.  The following instance attributes are off limits:
    __class__, __dict__, __module__.

That might be a reasonable start.

However, there is still the problem that the established technique for storing instance-specific state in Python is to use globally- accessible data attributes instead of a limited scope. We would also need to add a safe (private) place for instances to put state.

-- ?!ng