In Python we have a wonderful facility for customizing attribute access by defining __getattr__ or __getattribute__ in our classes. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, for reasons I don't know), this facility only works for explicit attribute access, i.e. accessing foo.bar. What I am in need of, for reasons I'll keep out of the discussion for now, is a similar facility for implicit attribute access, such as the call to foo.__len__ when something like len(foo) is executed. I would like some way to customize access during these implicit lookups without having to define each one in the class myself. Essentially what I am looking for is a mechanism like __getattribute__, only one that will work for these implicit lookups to functions like __len__, __str__, __getitem__, and so on. Hopefully my question makes sense.
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