On Oct 18, 2004, at 15:20, Josiah Carlson wrote:
I think the syntax looks good, but as per a thread in python-list, you cannot discover the order of class variables by any solution (metaclass or otherwise), due to the fact that they become part of the class dictionary; which is arbitrarily unordered.
If ordering is important to a user, one could have an optional __order__ attribute that gives the list of items in-order.
That's not quite true. TypedAttribute instances and iniSection's __new__ could have serial numbers.
I'm not saying that they can't be numbered, I'm saying that one cannot discover the ordering of assignment of attr1 and attr2 in the following:
class foo: attr1 = value1 attr2 = value2
If there is a mechanism for discovering the original ordering of those assignments, there are a group of users in c.l.py who would like to know, and Carlos' seemingly non-existant implementation could also use it.
That is true, but you do know that the expression value1 is evaluated before the expression value2, so it is possible to sort later for clever enough choices of value1 and value2. Since his proposed syntax invokes something for each attribute, then this trick can certainly be used.. here's a small demonstration: from itertools import count class Value(object): def __init__(self, value, serial=count()): self.serial = serial.next() self.value = value class Container(object): class __metaclass__(type): def __new__(cls, name, bases, dct): sorted = filter(lambda (k,v): isinstance(v, Value), dct.iteritems()) sorted.sort(lambda (ka,va),(kb, vb): cmp(va.serial, vb.serial)) dct['sorted'] = sorted return type.__new__(cls, name, bases, dct) class MyContainer(Container): p = Value(2) y = Value(0) t = Value(-1) h = Value(20) o = Value('x') n = Value('z') print ''.join([k for k,v in MyContainer.sorted]) python -bob