Hi, Thanks for the help a couple of days ago. I completed what I was doing and wrote a summary which I've posted at http://acooke.org/cute/PythonMeta0.html (it's kind of long to post here). I hope it might be useful to someone else - it's complete code for a simple metaprogramming task that uses metaclasses and descriptors.
I'd also appreciate further feedback if I've done anything stupid or if there's some interesting approach I've missed that might work better. Thanks again, Andrew -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list