Sept. 25, 2009
11:57 a.m.
Guido van Rossum wrote:
So, you don't care abut the repetition of x in "x = f(x)" but you'd like to have a way to implicitly pass an argument giving the string name of the target variable, like "x = f('x')" ?
Yes. I'm defining a property, and the descriptor happens to need to know the name of the property being defined, but that's an implementation detail. The user shouldn't be required, or even allowed, to specify it as an independent parameter.
I'm not sure that it's common enough to warrant special syntax;
Probably not very common in general, but I find myself doing this very intensively in some of my projects. I have two GUI libraries in which nearly every externally visible attribute is one of these properties. -- Greg