At 10:28 AM 1/4/05 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
Of course, more changes would be needed: docs, the test suite, and some simplifications to the instance method object implementation in classobject.c.
Does anyone think this is a bad idea?
Code that currently does 'aClass.aMethod.im_func' in order to access the function object would break, as would code that inspects 'im_self' to determine whether a method is a class or instance method. (Although code of the latter sort would already break with static methods, I suppose.) Cursory skimming of the first 100 Google hits for 'im_func' seems to show at least half a dozen instances of the first type of code, though. Such code would also be in the difficult position of having to do things two ways in order to be both forward and backward compatible. Also, I seem to recall once having relied on the behavior of a dynamically-created unbound method (via new.instancemethod) in order to create a descriptor of some sort. But I don't remember where or when I did it or whether I still care. :)