On Tuesday, December 3, 2013 7:03:41 PM UTC+1, rand...@fastmail.us wrote: > On Tue, Dec 3, 2013, at 12:14, Piotr Dobrogost wrote: > > > Hi! > > > I find global getattr() function awkward when reading code. > > What is the reason there's no "natural" syntax allowing to access > > attributes with names not being valid Python identifiers in a similar way > > to other attributes? > > Something along the line of > > my_object.'valid-attribute-name-but-not-valid-identifier'? > > The getattr function is meant for when your attribute name is in a > variable. Being able to use strings that aren't valid identifiers is a > side effect.
Why do you say it's a side effect? Could you elaborate? I see nothing odd in passing literal (string literal in this case) as a value of function's argument. > Why are you designing classes with attributes that aren't > valid identifiers? Attribute access syntax being very concise is very often preferred to dict's interface. That's why various containers expose their elements as attributes. In my case I'm using in-house web form library which provides FieldSet class holding objects of type Field or other FieldSets. This nesting leads to names of the form 'outer_fieldset-inner_fieldset-third_field' which are not valid identifiers due to minus sign. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
