Every now and then there's been talk of making it easier to subclass modules, and the most common use case that I can remember hearing about is descriptor protocol requiring code on the type. (For instance, you can't change a module-level constant into a property without moving away from the default ModuleType.) How bad would it be for the default ModuleType to have a __getattr__ function which defers to the instance? Something like this: def __getattr__(self, name): if '__getattr__' in self.__dict__: return self.__dict__['__getattr__'](name) raise AttributeError The biggest downside I'm seeing is that module attributes double as global names, which might mean this would get checked for every global name that ends up being resolved from the builtins (which is going to be a LOT). But I'm not sure if that's even true. Dumb idea? Already been thought of and rejected? ChrisA