Trying to understand += better

[Lie Ryan]

Roy Smith wrote:
> If I've got an object foo, and I execute:
> 
> foo.bar += baz
> 
> exactly what happens if foo does not have a 'bar' attribute?  It's
> pretty clear that foo.__getattr__('bar') gets called first, but it's a
> little murky after that.  Assume for the moment that foo.__getattr__
> ('bar') returns an object x.  I think the complete sequence of calls
> is:
> 
> foo.__getattr__('bar')  ==> x
> x.__add__(baz)  ==> y
> foo.__setattr__('bar', y)
> 
> but I'm not 100% sure.  It would be nice if it was, because that would
> let me do some very neat magic in a system I'm working on :-)
> 
> How would things change if X defined __iadd__()?


The semantic of the in-place operator is something like:
x += y
becomes
x = x.__iadd__(y)

thus
foo.bar += baz
becomes
foo.bar = foo.bar.__iadd__(baz)

So the call sequence is,
foo.__getattr__('bar') ==> x
x.__iadd__(baz) ==> y
foo.__setattr__('bar', y)

the default definition of object.__iadd__ is something like this:
def __iadd__(self, other):
     # this calls self.__add__ or other.__radd__ according to the
     # operator call rule, may call __coerce__ or any other magics
     # in operator calling
     return self + other