[portland] Seeking opinions on choosing data types: dictionary or instance attributes?

[Jeff Rush]

Nick Welch wrote:
> 
> Isn't UserDict pretty much a relic now, since new-style classes came
> around and let us inherit directly from dict?

Yes, UserDict is obsolete - subclassing from dict gives you more functionality
and better performance.


> On the original topic -- I've personally turned against abusing classes
> (or __getattr__) simply for the .foo.bar syntax.  Dict key access may be
> a little more punctuationey, but it reminds you that you're dealing with
> just a plain ol' dictionary, and that always feels nice to me.  If your
> classes are only there to contain some keys and values (and don't have
> any methods), then I feel that they fall into the category of needless
> syntactic sugar.  If you just need a dict, then.. just use a dict!

One objective factor for choosing between attribute and dictionary access is
whether the key names are legal Python identifiers.  If they are not, you
really want to use a dictionary rather than getattr(), in my opinion.

Using attribute access also gives you the option later of refactoring and
inserting special handling code.

Suppose you have:

  x.firstname -> "Jeff"
  x.lastname -> "Rush"

and one day you need the fullname.  Just add to your container class:

  @property
  def fullname(self):
      return "%s, %s" % (self.lastname, self.firstname)

and you have:

  x.fullname -> "Rush, Jeff"

Using a plain dictionary limits your flexibility in the future.

-Jeff