On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:17:47 -0700, Stephen Hansen wrote: > Leading-and-trailing double underscores are explicitly reserved for > Python to define as Special.
That part is correct. But of course Python doesn't prevent you from ignoring this rule (more of a guideline really). > They also imply a slightly different > calling semantic: normal leading-and-trailing double underscore methods > bypass instance lookup. This is semi-correct. Operator overloading and other special method lookup bypasses instance lookup and calls type(instance).__method__ but that has nothing to do with the double-underscore methods themselves. They operate normally if you call them by hand: >>> class C(object): ... def __add__(self, other): ... return "special" ... >>> c = C() >>> c.__add__ = lambda self, other: "not very special" >>> c + 4 'special' >>> c.__add__(c, 4) 'not very special' -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
