On Fri, 04 Nov 2005 10:28:52 -0500, Christopher Subich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Antoon Pardon wrote: >>>Since ints are immutable objects, you shouldn't expect the value of b.a >>>to be modified in place, and so there is an assignment to b.a, not A.a. >> >> >> You are now talking implementation details. I don't care about whatever >> explanation you give in terms of implementation details. I don't think >> it is sane that in a language multiple occurence of something like b.a >> in the same line can refer to different objects >> > >This isn't an implementation detail; to leading order, anything that >impacts the values of objects attached to names is a specification issue. > >An implementation detail is something like when garbage collection >actually happens; what happens to: > >b.a += 2 > >is very much within the language specification. Indeed, the language >specification dictates that an instance variable b.a is created if one >didn't exist before; this is true no matter if type(b.a) == int, or if >b.a is some esoteric mutable object that just happens to define >__iadd__(self,type(other) == int). But if it is an esoteric descriptor (or even a simple property, which is a descriptor), the behaviour will depend on the descriptor, and an instance variable can be created or not, as desired, along with any side effect you like. Regards, Bengt Richter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
