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[Python-Dev] PEP 549: Instance Properties (aka: module properties)

Larry Hastings larry at hastings.org
Thu Sep 7 18:49:32 EDT 2017 
On 09/06/2017 09:45 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> So we're looking for a competing PEP here. Shouldn't be long, just 
> summarize the discussion about use cases and generality here.

I don't think it's necessarily a /competing/ PEP; in my opinion, they 
serve slightly different use cases.  After all, property (and 
__getattribute__) were added long after __getattr__; if __getattr__ was 
a reasonable solution for property's use cases, why did we bother adding 
property?

One guiding principle I use when writing Python: if I need to provide an 
API, but there's conceptually only one of the thing, build it directly 
into a module as opposed to writing a class and making users use an 
instance.  (For example: the random module, although these days it 
provides both.)  So I see the situation as symmetric between modules and 
classes.  What is the use case for property / __getattr__ / 
__getattribute__ on a module?  The same as the use case for property / 
__getattr__ / __getattribute__ on a class.

Excluding Lib/test, there are 375 uses of "@property" in the stdlib in 
trunk, 60 uses of __getattr__, and 34 of __getattribute__.  Of course, 
property is used once per member, whereas each instance of __getattr__ 
and __getattribute__ could be used for arbitrarily-many members.  On the 
other hand, it's also possible that some uses of __getattr__ are legacy 
uses, and if property had been available it would have used that 
instead.  Anyway I assert that property is easily the most popular of 
these three techniques.

TBH I forgot the specific use case that inspired this--it's on a project 
I haven't touched in a while, in favor of devoting time to the 
Gilectomy.  But I can cite at least one place in the standard library 
that would have been better if it'd been implemented as a module 
property: os.stat_float_times().


//arry/
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