Magic words

[Philip Swartzleonard]

Seo Sanghyeon || Sat 13 Apr 2002 05:49:17a:

> Philip Swartzleonard <starx at pacbell.net> wrote
> 
>> The first section of the index[1] for the language reference manual
>> lists all of these things (the underscore section), with links.
> 
> Thank you very much for pointers, but I can think of something not
> listed there. For example, __all__ for "from module import *", pickle
> protocols, __new__ for subclassing from a type and so on. Is there a
> complete (or near-complete) list?
> 

Well, pickle protocols are defined by the pickle module, right? Thus are 
not part of the language, but just __foo__ names that the module calls on 
your object. For this kind of special name, I'd think you would _have_ to 
look in the documentation for the module that provides the functionality, 
and it would not be included on a language __x__ scorecard anyway.

For the __new__, I think the problem there is that the newer type/class 
unification structures and keywords haven't all trickled down into the 
reference documentation: if you want to learn about list comprehensions 
and object-based types, you currently have to go to the 'what's new in py 
2.2' documentation. These should be added to that index list in due time.

(Never heard of __all__ though, so... :\ )

-- 
Philip Sw "Starweaver" [rasx] :: www.rubydragon.com