[Python-Dev] Simpler reformulation of C inheritance Q.

Greg Ewing greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Wed, 07 Aug 2002 14:03:25 +1200 (NZST)


Christian Tismer <tismer@tismer.com>:

> The reason why I want to have extra data and function
> caches in the types is that this is *very* memory
> efficient, in comparison to stuffing things into the
> instances (which would be easy to implement).

Maybe you misunderstood -- the stuff I was talking
about *would* go in the type, not in the instances.
I was suggesting a generalisation of the way the
type object keeps some of its slots in extra
structures, and allowing you to add more such
structures.

> With meta-types, it now happens that
> types become instances, but types refuse to have slots.
> This needs to be changed, everything else is a workaround.

Yes, that would be more elegant, if it could be done.
I haven't looked closely enough at exactly why types
can't have slots to know how difficult it would be.
Maybe it's not difficult, in which case my suggestion
is unnecessary.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc.  |
greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+