replacing instance __setattr__

[Bernhard Herzog]

Jonathan Hogg <jonathan at onegoodidea.com> writes:

> There's only one special case that I know of and that's the special
> attribute methods, which are different for the reason I posted before: they
> *are* the mechanism that implements the lookup order.

I'm not sure about the new style classes as I haven't had the time to
really look at them yet, but for old style classes that's not quite
true.

For instance, __getattr__ does *not* define how attributes are looked
up. It's only called by the interpreter when the normal attribute lookup
fails. 

For __setattr__ and __delattr__ it's different. They do indeed override
the normal set/del attribute operation. Otherwise they wouldn't be
useful after all.

   Bernhard

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