I'm pretty sure this must not be a new idea, but it seems no one else has voiced their agitation about the name "__getattribute__" so far. Its closeness to "__getattr__" is only one thing that irritates tons of people, as is apparent through the endless repeating question about the difference between the two, and through the fact that every lecture on "new classes" in Python feels contrained to explain that difference. More importantly, the name "__getattribute__" does not reflect what this built-in methode is precisely for, namely "to implement attribute accesses for instances of the class" [1]. Thus, as I've been wondering the whole time, why is it not called "__accessattr__" instead? That would be much clearer and distinctly different to "__getattr__", not to mention being in sync with the "attr"-instead-of-"attribute" convention.
This whole issue seems so obvious and trivial to me that I've in fact expected it to be resolved by itself - respectively, by the Python language developer community which generally pays so much attention to details. Now, after it has failed to happen till now, I feel the strong urge to speak it out. It this qualified PEP stuff? Henry [1] Python Reference Manual (current release), section 3.3.2.1: http://docs.python.org/ref/new-style-attribute-access.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list