Anonymous attribute/property possible?

[Michael Hudson]

bokr at oz.net (Bengt Richter) writes:

> A class with an anonymous attribute/property would provide a place to put
> get/set/del-triggered code.
> 
> Use of an object with an anonymous property in an expression
> or statement would result in calling the get/set methods defined.
> 
> Thus you could write foo(bar) with the effect of foo(bar.__anonymous__)
> and bar() with the effect of bar.__anonymous__()
> 
> And bar = baz with the effect of bar.__anonymous__ = baz.
> 
> But since __anonymous__ could be a property, you could define
> methods at will (e.g., get_bar, and set_bar) and write
> bar = baz with the effect bar.set_bar(baz) and
> foo(bar) with the effect foo(bar.get_bar())
> 
> This might work nicely with an interpolated-string class.
> E.g.,
>   is = IS('The get_is anonymous property method will interpolate $variables')
>   print is # the reference would trigger interpolation with current values
>            # you could do this now, but you'd have to write "print is.some_property"
> 

Ouch.

> If you wanted to access the actual object that had an anonymous
> property, you'd have to give it a named method returning self for
> that purpose.
> 
> I think this could open up a whole world of scary delights ;-)
> (And ISTM without a backwards compatibility problem).

Just in case the fact that this is a horrible idea doesn't put you off
<wink>, how would you implement this without a fairly huge performance
hit?  LOAD_FAST is currently, well, fast.

Cheers,
M.

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