04-09-2009 Ken Newton krnewton@gmail.com wrote:

I like this version very much. I'm ready to put this into practice to see how it works in practice.

[snip]

Not only you (Ken) and me. :-) It appears that the idea is quite old. Nick Coghlan replied at python-ideas@python.org:

Jan Kaliszewski wrote:

...

What do you think about it?

It reminds me a bit of the old (short-lived) namespaces module:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060216094030/http://namespace.python-hosting.co...

Steven's draft PEP on the topic is still available in the python-list archives:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-February/307235.html

The problem we found with it was that the basic solutions (empty class and now named_tuple) were good enough that it wasn't worth the hassle involved in grabbing an extra library for it.

Named tuples (which indeed are really very nice) are read-only, but the approach they represent could (and IMHO should) be extended to some kind of mutable objects.

The old discussion, the above link points to, shows that such a dot-accessible dict-like class is something that many people need and repeatedly implemet it (more or less perfectly) for themselves.

Maybe that past proposition (to add a separate namespace module which a number types for viewing, chaining and so on) was too sophisticated?

Most common use cases could be covered with one attr-dict-like type, that could be placed in collections module (or even, in time, as a built-in factory function, together with namedtuple?).

Cheers, *j