On 18 Mar 2022, at 10:29, Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka@gmail.com> wrote:
Currently __slots__ can be either string or an iterable of strings.
1. If it is a string, it is a name of a single slot. Third-party code which iterates __slots__ will be confused.
2. If it is an iterable, it should emit names of slots. Note that non-reiterable iterators are accepted too, but it causes weird bugs if __slots__ is iterated more than once. For example it breaks default pickling and copying.
I propose to restrict the type of __slots__. Require it always been a tuple of strings. Most __slots__ in real code are tuples. It is rarely we need only single slot and set __slots__ as a string.
It will break some code (there are 2 occurrences in the stdlib an 1 in scripts), but that code can be easily fixed.
Pydoc supports __slots__ that is a dict, and will use the values in the dict als documentation for the slots. I’ve also seen code using ``__slots__ = “field1 field2”.split()``. I don’t particularly like this code pattern, but your proposal would break this. Also note that __slots__ only has a side effect during class definition, changing it afterwards is possible but has no effect (“class Foo: pass; Foo.__slots__ = 42”). This surprised my recently and I have no idea if this feature is ever used. Ronald
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