Hmm, isn't the trick with this type that you can access the various elements as attributes *and* using index notation ?
Indeed. In Py 2.2, you can do that two ways: A) indexmap = {'st_dev':0, 'st_ino':1} # etc class StatResult(tuple): def __getattr__(self,name): return self[indexmap[name]] B) fields = ['st_dev', 'st_ino'] #etc class StatResult(UserList.UserList): def __init__(self, dev, ino): self.st_dev = dev self.st_ino = ino def __getattr__(self, name): if name=="data": return [getattr(self,fname) for fname in fields] raise AttributeError, name def __setattr__(self, name, value): if name=="data": raise AttributeError, "data is read-only" self.__dict__[name] = value
Also, why should we hide something useful from the Python programmer if it's there anyway ?
Because it has unknown limitations (atleast, they are unknown to me at the moment; I probably could report them if I searched long enough). Regards, Martin