On Apr 18, 4:48 am, Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno. [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > Practically, this means that (amongst other niceties) : > - you can define functions outside classes and use them as instance or > class methods > - you can add/replaces methods dynamically on a per-class or > per-instance basis > - you can access the function object of a method and use it as a function > - you can define your own callable types, that - if you implement the > appropriate support for the descriptor protocol - will be usable as > methods too
ok, that's convincing (i had thought the majority of these were already possible, albeit with some kind of hard-coded "magic" behind the scenes). [...] > > by referring to the titanic > > i didn't mean that python was a disaster, rather that the "iceberg" is > > still there (i am not 100% sure what the iceberg is, but it's > > something > > to do with making namespaces explicit in some places and not others). > > I guess you're thinking of the self argument, declared in the function's > signature but not "explicitly passed" when calling the method ? not really. more to do with when namespaces (i am not sure i have the right term - the dictionary that provides the mapping from name to object) are explicit or implicit. for example, python has closures (implicit lookup) and "self" (explicit lookup). but as i said, i don't have a clear argument - something just feels "odd". at the same time, i know that language design is a practical business and so this is probably not important. finally, thank you for pointing me to sql alchemy (i think it was you?). it really is excellent. andrew -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
