first thing: properties. i prefer this approach to properties (example below). true, it involves some magic, but the magic is very restricted and contained. import inspect def getter(func): namespace = inspect.stack()[1][0].f_locals p = namespace.get(func.func_name) if p is None: p = property(func) else: p = property(func, p.fset, p.fdel) return p def setter(func): namespace = inspect.stack()[1][0].f_locals p = namespace.get(func.func_name) if p is None: p = property(None, func) else: p = property(p.fget, func, p.fdel) return p class File(object): def __init__(self): self._pos = 8 @getter def position(self): return self._pos @setter def position(self, value): self._pos = value f = File() print f.position f.position = 11 print f.position ============================================== btw, in py3k, with class decorators, you could instead use class File: @propertyclass class position: def get(self): return self.tell() def set(self): return self.tell() ============================================== second -- metaclasses. there's some notion (Josiah et al) that metaclasses were introduced to make classes behave as generic attribute containers. this is not true. using metaclasses like so was not the original intent. metaclasses are the types of types. they also happened to be executed before the class body is made into a class, which means they can be used to tweak class creation, but that's a technicality. using this feature to turn classes into anything you want is wrong: it's implicit, complex, and mostly unreadable by the common programmer. i'd guess 80% of python programmers have never used metaclasses. it's a difficult concept, and should be used sparsely. class decorators would cover ~70% of the use-cases for metaclasses, but for some reason, people insist on complicating even more the metaclass machinery in py3k. see my protest [1], which was silently ignored. what you people are asking for is a new language construct which allows the definition of syntactic namespaces. much like the deceased make pep. (mis)using classes for this purpose is wrong. it's different -- it's not a class anymore. so why is it being defined by a class-clause? @property namespace foo: def get(self): .... def set(self): .... -tomer [1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-June/008330.html