__call__ considered harmful or indispensable?

[Paul Rubin]

skip at pobox.com writes:
> In this particular case it was clearly unnecessary and just obfuscated the
> code.  I'm wondering, are there some general cases where __call__ methods of
> a user-defined class are simply indispensable?

I don't know about "indispensable" but __call__ is convenient sometimes
and I do use it.  I've wished that modules supported call, so I could
say

    import foo
    x = foo(3)

instead of having to say x=foo.foo(3) or something like that.