object query assigned variable name?

[John O'Hagan]

On Fri, 1 May 2009, warpcat wrote:
> I've passed this around some other groups, and I'm being told
> "probably not possible".  But I thought I'd try here as well :)   I
> *did* search first, and found several similar threads, but they
> quickly tangented into other specifics of the language that were a bit
> over my head :)  At any rate, here's a simple example, I'd love to
> know if as shown, is somehow possible:
>
> Given an object:
>
> class Spam(object):
>     def __init__(self):
>         # stuff....
>
> I'd like it to print, when instanced, something like this:
> >>> s = Spam()
>
> I’m assigned to s!

If you just want the names an instance has in a given namespace, you could 
give your class a method like:

class KnowNames(object):
    def get_names(self, namespace):
        id_str = str(hex(id(self))[:-1])
        return [i for i in namespace if id_str in str(namespace[i])]

which will give you a list of names when called on an instance.

But if you try moving that method inside __init__(), it returns an empty list 
because any assignment is not yet in the namespace. 

I can see that it's tantalizing, though, because _somebody_ must know about 
the assignment; after all, we just executed it!

Regards,

John