[Chicago] Prevent access to method as attribute

[Daniel Uber]

Well, I for one am guilty of doing just this to objects. Switching between smalltalk and python gives me a headache when sending unary messages and calling functions without arguments doesn't line up right in my head.

If there is a good, clean, global way to do this, I'd love to see it. Maybe if 'if' were stricter about boolean values (expecting True), it would be a simple idea, but that's a language and idiom shift everywhere else. Short of that, just checking to see if the return value is a function rather than a value (I know, a function _is_ a value), perhaps in an aware editor, is a better way to catch this type of mistake.

Dan Uber

On Oct 16, 2012, at 11:58 AM, Brian Ray <brianhray at gmail.com> wrote:

> Question came up from a colleague:
> 
> I wonder, if there is a simple way in Python to add a hook to class that
> makes sure methods don't not get called as attributes.
> 
> class A:
>    def isValid(self):
>           return False
> 
> 
> if A().isValid:
>    print 'Always True'
> 
> 
> 
> I had some wacky and wild thoughts about subclassing something to
> check each and every call and using inspect module to see how it was
> called. Generally, I know it is the callers responsibility to know
> what they are doing. We are all responsible adults here, correct?
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Brian Ray
> @brianray
> (773) 669-7717
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