Thanks to all of you for your reply's i had no idea it would get this sort of response, i've read through most of the posts and it seems that its a active topic.
My question remains however, i suppose i'm not familiar with how this functions in other languages, but what is the common way of referring to a class variable. is <class>.<var> the norm? or <instance>.<var> the norm. I just seems to me that <instance>.<var> shouldn't defer to the class variable if an instance variable of the same name does not exists, it should, at least how i understand it raise an exception. Is my thinking way off here? Graham -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list