At 12:10 PM 8/25/2010 +1200, Greg Ewing wrote:
Consider an object that is trying to be a transparent proxy for another object, and behave as much as possible as though it really were the other object. Should an attribute statically defined on the proxied object be considered dynamically defined on the proxy? If so, then the proxy isn't as transparent as some people may want.
Yep. That's why the proposed addition to inspect is a bad idea. If we encourage that sort of static thinking, it will lead to people creating all sorts of breakage with respect to more dynamic code. AFAICT, the whole "avoid running code" thing only makes sense for a debugging tool -- at which point, you can always use the trace facility and throw an error when any Python code runs that's not part of your debugging tool. Something like: def exists(ob, attr): __running__ = True # ... set trace function here try: try: getattr(ob, attr) return True except AttributeError: return False except CodeRanError: return True # or False if you prefer finally: __running__ = False # restore old tracing here Where the trace function is just something that throws CodeRanError if it detects a "call" event and the __running__ flag is True. This would stop any Python code from actually executing. (It'd need to keep the same trace function for c_call events, since that might lead to nested non-C calls .) Of course, a debugger's object inspection tool would probably actually want to return either the attribute value, or a special value to mean "dyanmic calculation needed".