Getters and Setters

[Tim Peters]

[Neil Schemenauer]
> ...
> Bleech to CLOS or to Lisp or to automatic getters and setters?

Just to automagic attr manglers for class instances.  Those grew out of
earlier gimmicks for modeling C-like structs, where they were more
appropriate.

> ...
> Your code is fast and elegant but it causes reference loops.

?  Not under my Python <wink> -- stick a __del__ method in the test class
that prints something and you'll see that objects go away when you expect.
The function object assigned to self.set/get_XXX contains one ref to
self.__dict__ and another to the attr's string name, and that's it; it is
*not* a bound method object (which would also hold a reference to self),
just a function object.  So there's no cycle unless you force one, like

    instance.setWhatever(instance)

But then you would have had a cycle without this code too.

> only Python had real GC (and closures and macros and generators
> and coroutines and ...).
>
>     Neil (running very quickly and hiding)

It's OK to want everything!  It's just ill-advised to pine for it <wink>.

common-lisp-was-god's-experiment-to-see-whether-"everything"-
    was-what-people-really-wanted-ly y'rs  - tim