[Python-Dev] Enum Eccentricities (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Sep 24 00:07:45 CEST 2013

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

It might not be a rule, but it's certainly the norm. I reckon that class attributes that aren't accessible from the instance are significantly more surprising than Color.red.blue.

There are really two different kinds of things that we refer to as "class attributes". One is things that really are attributes of the class itself, and the other is things that are meant to serve as default or shared instance attributes.

The confusion comes in because we use the same terminology for both, and because Python doesn't provide any straightforward way of creating user-defined class-only attributes, so shared attributes tend to get abused for that purpose. Then when someone comes along and creates a true class-only attribute, people get all surprised and complain about it. They shouldn't, IMO.

-- Greg

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