[Python-Dev] Meta-reflections (original) (raw)

David Ascher DavidA@ActiveState.com
Wed, 20 Feb 2002 11:57:37 -0800

Kevin:

> My take on this thread is that I think it's simply not going to happen > that slots are going to act 100% like attributes except for > performance/memory considerations. It would be nice, but if that had > been possible, then they'd simply be an internal optimization and would > have no syntactic impact.

I'd like to know why else you think that?

Ye old poverty of the imagination argument, coupled with the assumption that Guido had time to finish what he'd started I guess =).

I'm fairly confident that I can submit a patch that accomplishes this (and even fix the following issue).

Great!

I can't channel Guido very well, but everytime that he's talked about slots in my presence, he talked about their main purpose as a memory-savings one. If he didn't have other intents, and if you can limit their impact to pure memory savings, then more power to all of us thanks to you.

Ouch! You've discovered another problem with the current implementation. You have effectively removed the slot descriptor from class A and replaced it with a class attribute. In fact, I don't think you can ever re-create the slot descriptor!

Ooh, cool. You're right:

after deleting the class attribute:

a.a = 1100 Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? AttributeError: 'A' object has no attribute 'a'

which is a really wacky error message if you look at the case of the letters...

--david