These are some half-baked ideas about getting classes and types to look more similar. I would like to know whether they are workable or not and so I present them to the people best equipped to tell me. Many extension types have a __getattr__ that looks like this: static PyObject * Xxo_getattr(XxoObject *self, char *name) { // try to do some work with known attribute names, else: return Py_FindMethod(Xxo_methods, (PyObject *)self, name); } Py_FindMethod can (despite its name) return any Python object, including ordinary (non-function) attributes. It also has complete access to the object's state and type through the self parameter. Here's what we do today for __doc__: if (strcmp(name, "__doc__") == 0) { char *doc = self->ob_type->tp_doc; if (doc != NULL) return PyString_FromString(doc); } Why can't we do this for all magic methods? * __class__ would return for the type object * __add__,__len__, __call__, ... would return a method wrapper around the appropriate slot, * __init__ might map to a no-op I think that Py_FindMethod could even implement inheritance between types if we wanted. We already do this magic for __methods__ and __doc__. Why not for all of the magic methods? Many other types implement no getattr at all (the slot is NULL). In that case, I think that we have carte blanche to define their getattr behavior as instance-like as possible. Finally there are the types with getattrs that do not dispatch to Py_FindMethod. we can just change those over manually. Extension authors will do the same when they realize that their types are not inheriting the features that the other types are. Benefits: * objects based on extension types would "look more like" classes to Python programmers so there is less confusion about how they are different * users could stop using the type() function to get concrete types and instead use __class__. After a version or two, type() could be formally deprecated in favor of isinstance and __class__. * we will have started some momentum towards type/class unification which we could continue on into __setattr__ and subclassing. -- Take a recipe. Leave a recipe. Python Cookbook! http://www.activestate.com/pythoncookbook