On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 4:47 PM Chris Angelico
There are many things that can be implemented with dunders, yes, but in Python, I would expect these two functions to behave identically:
def f1(x): return frob(x).spam
def f2(x): f = frob(x) s = f.spam return s
This correlation is critical to sane refactoring. You should be able to transform f1 into f2, and then insert print calls to see what 'f' and 's' are, without affecting the behaviour of the function. The proposed magic would change and completely break this; and as such, it violates programmer expectations *across many languages* regarding refactoring.
Chris, I might need a bit more education here. I am trying to guess what you meant to say here is if in f2(), f or s is already defined, it will then change the "usual" understanding. In this case, I am assuming when you start to assign in f2() a local variable f or s with an object that has __set/getself__(), then you know later on assigning to it will mean differently. How is this different from descriptors? when you do x.y = z and if y is a descriptor you don't expect x.y is now pointing/binding to z, you have to understand the object behavior anyway. I do not see how this is different in the set/getself() case.