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Inheritance in extension types

Adrien Hernot amh at BSD-DK.dk
Mon Sep 10 12:14:44 EDT 2001 
Hi!
 
  I am stuck in a problem concerning python extensions. I am quite new to
python and will try to describe my problem as precisely as possible.
 
I want to export several C++ classes to python. I succeded for most of the
functionalities I want, but for one: inheritance. That is, I would like the wrapper to class A
to be able to access function in class B if B is a base of A. Also, I would like
a function accepting B as argument to be able to accept A. For that I need inheritance
information for my wrappers to use.
 
  I can see easy ways to do that, but I guess there is a 'supported' way of doing
thoses things. I saw in the PyTypeObject structure a zone reserved to 'Attribute
descriptor and subclassing stuff' (as the comment says, Include/object.h l.275).
To be precise, the fields tp_base and tp_bases seems to be what I need.
 
  Is it possible to set A's tp_base (tp_bases) to point to B so that magically if an attribute
is not found by A's getattr(), python will call B's getattr() ?
 
  Is it possible to set A's tp_base (tp_bases?) to point to B so that my hand written
getattr() for A will also call any object found in A's tp_base ?
 
  What are those fields used for ?
 
 
 
  Also, looking through the python sources, I found a PyClass_Type definition.
As of now, my wrappers declare new instances of PyTypeObject (one per wrapped class)
and in the init function of the module, I explicitly set the ob_type field to PyType_Type.
Could not I set it to PyClass_Type and benefit from new python functionalities ?
 
  Please keep in mind that I don't master python at all and that the python internals
are even more obscure to me.
(I am not part of the mailing list, so please CC me in replies)
 
  Adrien
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