[Python-Dev] PEP 549: Instance Properties (aka: module properties)

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>  > Why not adding both? Properties do have their uses as does __getattr__.
>
> In that case I would just add __getattr__ to module.c, and add a recipe or
> perhaps a utility module that implements a __getattr__ you can put into your
> module if you want @property support. That way you can have both but you
> only need a little bit of code in module.c to check for __getattr__ and call
> it when you'd otherwise raise AttributeError.

Unfortunately I don't think this works. If there's a @property object
present in the module's instance dict, then __getattribute__ will
return it directly instead of calling __getattr__.

(I guess for full property emulation you'd also need to override
__setattr__ and __dir__, but I don't know how important that is.)

We could consider letting modules overload __getattribute__ instead of
__getattr__, but I don't think this is viable either -- a key feature
of __getattr__ is that it doesn't add overhead to normal lookups. If
you implement deprecation warnings by overloading __getattribute__,
then it makes all your users slower, even the ones who never touch the
deprecated attributes. __getattr__ is much better than
__getattribute__ for this purpose.

Alternatively we can have a recipe that implements @property support
using __class__ assignment and overriding
__getattribute__/__setattr__/__dir__, so instead of 'from
module_helper.property_emulation import __getattr__' it'd be 'from
module_helper import enable_property_emulation;
enable_property_emulation(__name__)'. Still has the slowdown problem
but it would work.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org