Factory for Struct-like classes

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:00:08 -0300, Dan Lenski <dlenski at gmail.com>  
escribi�:

> On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:28:53 -0700, Dan Lenski wrote:
>> So is there a bug in the Python docs?  Does __slots__ in fact work with
>> subclasses of tuple?
>>
> Anybody think that this may actually be a mistake in the Python docs?

It appears that __slots__ must be empty in those cases. Trying to use  
anything non-empty raises a TypeError:

>>> class xtuple(tuple):
...   __slots__ = ('abc',)
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: nonempty __slots__ not supported for subtype of 'tuple'

So __slots__ partially works - it avoids creating an instance __dict__,  
but you can't add additional instance attributes.

But there is a point I don't understand yet - by example, array.array  
should fail too, same as tuple, AFAICT it is declared using  
PyObject_VAR_HEAD. But __slots__ works fine with it:

>>> from array import array
>>> class xarray(array):
...   __slots__ = ('foo','bar')
...
>>> a = xarray('b', [1,2,3])
>>> a
array('b', [1, 2, 3])
>>> a.foo
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AttributeError: foo

(Note the short error message above: I guess it comes from the "foo" slot  
containing NULL)

>>> a.foo = 123
>>> a.foo
123
>>> a.xxx
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AttributeError: 'xarray' object has no attribute 'xxx'
>>> a.xxx = 123
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AttributeError: 'xarray' object has no attribute 'xxx'

So I don't get *what* exactly makes a type reject __slots__ - it's not the  
variable part alone as the docs imply (and I can't find the error message  
anywhere to check the actual code)

> Who
> would I contact about getting them corrected?

I think you should report it at http://bugs.python.org/ -- best including  
a documentation patch, if possible.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina