__slots_ and inheritance

[Alexander Schmolck]

Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:

> I suspect that any confusion may be caused by seeing __slots__
> as something OTHER than an optimization -- for example, as a
> way to reproduce the behavior of other languages where you
> can, or must, specify possible attributes for every class.  It
> isn't, really -- it's a memory-consumption optimization.

This confusion seems sort of understandable, given "What's new to python2.2"
introduced it explicitly as a bug avoidance feature.

__slots__ is the one addition in python2.2 that really annoys me. It seems an
ill-conceived jumble of conceptually unrelated things (bug avoidance,
optimization, safety, encapsulation) that screws up reflection big time for
little apparent gain. As Knuth said ...

'as