There are two ways to "bind" a built-in function to an object.
One would be to do what happens for Python functions, which is in effect a currying: f.__get__(obj) yields a function g that when called as g(arg1, ...) calls f(obj, arg1, ...).
That's the one I'm talking about. I forgot to explain that the problem occurs when I'm creating a *Python* class object and populating it with functions that are supposed to be methods. Currently I have to manually wrap each function in an unbound method object before putting it in the class's __dict__. If that happened automatically on access, I would be able to create Python classes that behave more like the real thing.
OK, are you up for submitting a patch? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)