Why property works only for objects?

[Alex Martelli]

Michal Kwiatkowski <ruby at no.spam> wrote:
   ...
> The problem is I have an instance of a given class (say BaseClass) and I
> want it to implement some attribute accesses as method calls. I'm not a
> creator of this object, so changing definition of BaseClass or
> subclassing it is not an option. 

Wrong!  Of _course_ it's an option -- why do you think it matters at all
whether you're the creator of this object?!

> Code below doesn't work, but shows my
> intention:
> 
> # obj is instance of BaseClass
> def get_x(self):
>     # ...
> def set_x(self, value):
>     # ...
> obj.x = property(get_x, set_x)

def insert_property(obj, name, getter, setter):
    class sub(obj.__class__): pass
    setattr(sub, name, property(getter, setter))
    obj.__class__ = sub

See?  Of COURSE you can subclass -- not hard at all, really.


Alex