Greg Ewing wrote:

class C:

foo = overridable_property('foo', "The foo property")

def get_foo(self): ...

def set_foo(self, x): ...

This has the advantage that the accessor methods can be overridden in subclasses with the expected effect.

This is a point I was going to bring up.

The only wart is the necessity of mentioning the property name twice, once on the lhs and once as an argument. I haven't thought of a good solution to that, yet.

Have a look at my comment to Steven Bethard's recipe: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/408713 Tim Delaney