There are a lot of entirely valid properties that look something like this:
@property def attr(self): try: return data_store[lookup_key] except KeyError: raise AttributeError("attr")
But wouldn't something like this be implemented more commonly with __getattr__ instead (likely there is more than one such property in a real example)? Even though __getattr__ has a similar problem (a bad AttributeError inside can cause many bugs), I'd agree it would probably be too difficult to change that without breaking a lot of code. For __get__, the errors are arguably more confusing (e.g. when used with @property) and the legitimate use case, while existing, seems more infrequent to me: I did a github search and there was a small number of cases, but most were for code written in python 2 anyway. Here a couple of valid ones: https://github.com/dimavitvickiy/server/blob/a9a6ea2a155b56b84d20a199b594841... https://github.com/dropbox/pyston/blob/75562e57a8ec2f6f7bd0cf52012d49c0dc3d2... Cheers, Zahari
This is one of the many cases where IDEs with some form of static structural checking really do make development easier - the "self.nonexisting" would be flagged as non-existent directly in the editor, even before you attempted to run the code.
In my particular case, the class had a __getattr__ that generated properties dynamically. Therefore an IDE was unlikely to be helpful.
Cheers, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia