Python language suggestion

[Martijn Faassen]

Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:
> Andrew Dalke wrote:

>> I believe he means
>>   foo.'bar bletch'
>> as an alternate way of doing
>>   getattr(foo, 'bar bletch')
>> 
>> not as foo['bar bletch']

> That's not what he said.  He explicitly used the subscription notation
> and even said "dictionary-like objects."

But an instance is quite a bit like a dictionary, and can be considered
to be syntactic sugar for one.

Anyway, if the proposal is what Andrew is suggesting, it's an interesting
idea, which I'm mulling over too. I don't know..

One problem seems to be the string methods. What happens here?

foo.' bar '.strip()

Also, where does it end? After all, not only strings can be used as 
dictionary keys:

foo.1 = 2

Though I just checked and setattr() certainly doesn't accept:

settattr(a, 1, "foo")

It does work through __dict__ though:

a.__dict__[1] = "foo"

print a.__dict__[1]

But this seems to be of limited applicability; getattr only takes strings
too. :)

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?