On Jan 15, 2:22 pm, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > On 1/15/2010 3:37 PM, Sean DiZazzo wrote: > > > Should the following be legal? > > >>>> class TEST(object): pass > > ... > >>>> t = TEST() > >>>> setattr(t, "", "123") > >>>> getattr(t, "") > > '123' > > Different people have different opinions as to whether setattr (and > correspondingly getattr) should be strict or permissive as to whether or > not the 'name' string is a legal name. CPython is permissive. The > rationale is that checking would take time and prevent possible > legitimate use cases. > > CPython is actually looser than this. Try > > t.__dict__[1] = 2 > > Now there is an 'attribute' whose 'name' is an int! -- and which can > only be accessed via the same trick of delving into the internals. This > is, however, implementation behavior that would go away if an > implementation used string-key-only dicts to store attributes. > > Terry Jan Reedy
Interesting. I can understand the "would take time" argument, but I don't see any legitimate use case for an attribute only accessible via getattr(). Well, at least not a pythonic use case. Thanks for the info! ~Sean -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
