[Python-Dev] Capabilities

[Ka-Ping Yee]

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