[Python-3000] Fixing super anyone?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:53 AM 4/20/2007 -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>Also, what arguments are passed to the hook? For this purpose the
>class object is the only thing needed -- but is that always
>sufficient?

I'd want to have the attribute name as an argument, too, at least for other 
uses of the hook.  PEAK and Chandler both have special metaclasses to do 
this sort of attribute-class association, and I believe Paste does too (it 
might be some other project(s) by Ian Bicking, e.g. SQLObject or 
FormEncode).  It comes up pretty much anywhere that people have some sort 
of object-attribute system.  Having a built-in hook for this would be nice.

Ideally, the return value of the hook should then be used as the 
descriptor, rather than the original one; PEAK uses an approach like this 
to do things like:

     class Whatever:
         foo = bar = DelegateTo('otherattribute')

where the foo and bar attributes are being set up to delegate to the foo 
and bar attributes of self.someattribute.  (i.e., foo and bar end up with 
separate descriptors, because the DelegateTo descriptor's association hook 
is called twice, once with 'foo' and once with 'bar', and the return values 
become the actual descriptors used in the class.)

One question, however, would be whether it should refer to the class 
*after* decoration, or before.  For the super() use case, it would 
presumably need to be the *decorated* class, which might make things a bit 
more complicated.

I also wonder if this hook mightn't be usable to implement abstractmethod 
as well?