I was reading the "metaclass insanity" thread this morning about dotted __name__ for nested classes, and I thought I should chime in that I've actually *used* this technique. That is, I've had classes of the form:

class outer: class inner: ...

And then regenerated 'inner' such that inner.__name__ == 'outer.inner' and stored it in globals()['outer.inner']. This *does* work with existing pickle code; in fact it worked as far back as Python 1.5.2!

OK. Setting __name__ to 'outer.inner' seems to be the best solution, so I'll add that to my TODO list. [SF bug #633930]

As for *why* I had inner classes, the following might be a good example:

class ModelElement(Element):

class isSpecification(model.Field): isRequired = 1 qualifiedName = 'Foundation.Core.ModelElement.isSpecification' _XMINames = ('Foundation.Core.ModelElement.isSpecification',) name = 'isSpecification' referencedType = 'Boolean'

class stereotype(model.Reference): isNavigable = 0 isRequired = 1 _XMINames = ('Foundation.Core.ModelElement.stereotype',) name = 'stereotype' referencedType = 'Stereotype' refTypeQN = 'Foundation.Core.ModelElement.stereotype' referencedEnd = 'extendedElements'

This is a tiny excerpt from some automatically generated code which defines the UML 1.3 metamodel as a set of Python classes. The nested classes represent structural features of the defined outer class, and enforce properties such as multiplicity, requiredness, etc., as you can see.

In an earlier version of this work, the inner classes had metaclasses whose __get__ method instantiated the inner class, and placed an instance in the outer object instance. That is, each ModelElement instance would have a 'stereotype' instance created on demand, which would manage the 'stereotype' property. And for this to be picklable, it was necessary for the inner classes to be accessible by the pickle machinery -- hence my use of qualified class names, as described above.

I will admit that I no longer use this approach for the inner classes; I found a way to get by without ever instantiating them. The above code is still valid, but the metaclasses used are different. So the pickling is simpler and faster.

I'm not sure if this is really an argument for or against, but at least it's actual usage. :)

And I think there's nothing wrong with it -- it's a different use of classes, but makes sense; it's a good use of nested namespaces (as opposed to nesting helper classes inside the main class which they help). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)