[Python-Dev] apparent ruminations on mutable immutables (was: PEP 351, the freeze protocol)

[Noam Raphael]

On 11/1/05, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote:
...
>
> I still consider it dead.
>    "If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea."

It is sometimes true, but not always. It may mean two other things:
1. The one trying to explain is not talented enough.
2. The implementation is really not very simple. A hash table, used so
widely in Python, is really not a simple idea, and it's not that easy
to explain.
>
> Also, not all user-defined classes have a __dict__, and not all
> user-defined classes can have arbitrary attributes added to them.
>
> c>>> class foo(object):
> ...     __slots__ = ['lst']
> ...     def __init__(self):
> ...         self.lst = []
> ...
> >>> a = foo()
> >>> a.bar = 1
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> AttributeError: 'foo' object has no attribute 'bar'
> >>>
It doesn't matter. It only means that the implementation would have to
make frozen copies also of __slots__ items, when freezing a
user-defined class.

I am afraid that this question proves that I didn't convey my idea to
you. If you like, please forgive my inability to explain it clearly,
and try again to understand my idea, by going over what I wrote again,
and thinking on it. You can also wait for the PEP that I intend to
write. And you can also forget about it, if you don't want to bother
with it - you've already helped a lot.

Noam