James Stroud wrote:
I resisted posting a similar question recently. After much
consideration, I realized that the inability to reference a class inside
its own definition must have been a deliberate design of the language.
The class *does not exist* to be referenced from inside its body until
after the body is executed and type(name, bases, namespace) is called.
class name(bases): body
is more or less equivalent to
name = type('name', bases, exec(body,{}))
except that the exec function (in 3.0) returns None instead of the
passed in namespace.
I think is would be possible to create and name-bind a blank class
first, but then there would need to be a mechanism delete the class if
the body execution failed. Because class definition can be nested, the
mechanism would need a stack of classes. In addition, this would be a
change in sequence from the usual assignment statement.
tjr
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