too dynamic - how to avoid?

[Alexander Schmolck]

"mic" <aldo123 at onet.pl> writes:

> I've spent last hour trying to debug my code, when I found out that instead
> of executing object's method I accidentaly overridden it with variable (see
> below example). My stupid! But as the system becomes more complex, I begun
> to wonder how to avoid such situations in the future. Does anybody have some
> experiences about that?

- use of decent naming schemes presumably helps (and if your class gets so big
  that you can't remember what are attributes and what are methods refactoring
  would probably be a good idea)

- if that's not enough you can always do something like override __setattr__,
  to check that you don't overwrite instance methods, e.g. (UNTESTED):

    import types
    class bar:
    ...  
      def __setattr__(self, attr, value):
          if isinstance(getattr(self, attr, None), types.MethodType):
             raise RuntimeError("Trying to overwrite method %s" % attr)
          else setattr(self, attr, value)


- if you need this often, you could write a function or metaclass to avoid
  duplicating the above in all classes where you feel you need it.


'as