[Python-Dev] Metaclass problem in the "with" statement semantics in PEP 343

[Guido van Rossum]

On 11/29/05, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> The bit that more concerns me is the behavioural discrepancy that comes from
> having a piece of syntax that looks in the instance dictionary. No other
> Python syntax is affected by the instance attributes - if the object doesn't
> have the right type, you're out of luck.

I'm not sure I buy that. Surely there are plenty of other places that
call PyObject_GetAttr(). Classic classes still let you put an __add__
attribute in the instance dict to make it addable (though admittedly
this is a weak argument since it'll go away in Py3k).

> Sticking an __iter__ method on an instance doesn't turn an object into an
> iterator, but with the current semantics, doing the same thing with
> __context__ *will* give you a manageable context.

This is all a very gray area. Before Python 2.2 most of the built-in
operations *did* call PyObject_GetAttr(). I added the slots mostly as
a speed-up, and the change in semantics was a side-effect of that.

And I'm still not sure why you care -- apart from the error case, it's
not going to affect anybody's code -- you should never use __xyzzy__
names except as documented since their undocumented use can change.
(So yes I'm keeping the door open for turning __context__ into a slot
later.)

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)