"Data" vs. "Non-data" Descriptors in PEP 252, and "once" attributes

Martin von Loewis loewis at informatik.hu-berlin.de
Mon Feb 25 05:40:22 EST 2002


Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> writes:

> Interestingly, this does *not* work if you try to do something similar 
> with the built-in 'property' type.  

I don't find this surprising. The builtin property type has a fixed
meaning for its constructor argument: they are callables, and they are
called on each access. How did you mean to implement your "once"
properties with it?

> Does anyone know if this usage is safe for future Python versions? 

That is the intention. There may be a different syntax in addition to
the one you are using now, which may allow you to write

    class aThing(object):

        def anAttr(self) [once]:
            print "computing anAttr"
            return 100*100

The idea is that at the end of the function definition, once is lookup
up and called with the function that was just defined; whatever it
returns is then taken as the value of anAttr inside aThing.

> Operationally, it seems it would be hard to change any of this in a way 
> that would break my "once" examples without also breaking lots of other 
> things.  But the PEP doesn't really give an official way to create either 
> a data or non-data descriptor; it just says what the current 
> implementation does.  Hence my concern.

Nobody can tell the future with certainty. If you think that certain
wording would tighten the PEP to make you feel more safe, just submit
a patch for the PEP to SF.

Regards,
Martin




More information about the Python-list mailing list