There is more than one way to do it - and for no apparent reason.

[Paul Wright]

In article <3C70ECB1.2090709 at mxm.dk>, Max M  <maxm at mxm.dk> wrote:
>Basically you can say that JScript uses the dictionary notation for 
>getting attributes. As fas I can see this is smarter than the way we do 
>it in Python where we have several notations for the same action:
>
>In an object:
>setattr(myObj, 'name', 'max')
>getattr(myObj, 'name')
>
>In a dict:
>myObj['name'] = 'max'
>myObj['name']
...
>Wouldn't it be a good idea to unify the dict and the object so that both 
>could be called with attribute and dict notation like in JScript?

Not in the language itself, no. Since Python has established a
conceptual difference between dictionary keys and attributes, to change
that now would break existing code. What I mean is that there are
objects which provide a dictionary interface (using "[]") where the
coder does not want to return the attribute of the same name: the
rfc822.Message class, for example.

If you really want it, there's nothing stopping you doing it for your
own classes:

class Thing:

        def __getitem__ (self, key):
                return getattr (self, key)

        def __setitem__ (self, key, value):
                setattr (self, key, value)

probably does what you want. See also
<http://www.python.org/doc/current/ref/sequence-types.html> 

I'm not sure I'd recommend it, though, as using getattr and setattr is
the standard way to do it.

-- 
Paul Wright | http://pobox.com/~pw201 |