On 13-Sep-05, at 7:22 PM, Arthur wrote: > My argument though is with you, not Guido. It is about use cases for > existing features, not about the features themselves. And in the > particular case of properties, it was only in going back to Guido's > own > use case illustration that I begin to develop some comfort with why > properties are there - why they are a neat solution to a limited > set of > problems. I understand them now more in terms of something akin to > a GUI event, or a SQL trigger. You have a need to know when > something attempts to set or get a particular attribute. The > relation > to the actual attribute might be tenous. It's an event. It might > begin > a process that sends an e-mail to Mary. Who knows what. Its all quite > practical and tangible stuff, though.
As Guido has said, properties don't do anything that couldn't be done before with __getattr__ and __setattr__, they just give a cleaner syntax for it. Since VPython makes extensive use of __getattr__ and __setattr__, do you think you would like the package more or less if they used properties instead? Or perhaps if instead of (I don't actually remember if VPython allows named colours, but bear with me for this example): ball = sphere(color=blue) # a blue sphere appears on the screen ball.color = 'red' # the ball changes instantly to red would this be better if we wrote: ball = sphere(color='blue') ball.setColor('red') does that make it more readable, or less? --Dethe "Trusting a scientist on questions of metaphysics is like paying someone else to worship God for you." -- Bill Welton _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig