Metaclasses vs. standard Python reflection?

[Ian Bicking]

On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 03:43, Jack Diederich wrote:
> metaclasses are like that while or for loop, you can work around their absence
> but it is nice not to have to.  metaclasses make some hard things easier and 
> less error prone.  There are a number of ways to get the same effect, but none
> as tidy.  Other languages solve the same problem with code generation tools[1]

Indeed, people *do* sometimes do code generation in Python, and it would
be better to change that to metaclasses.  There's several database
persistence tools that do this, and I believe a tool for creating Python
objects out of a XML DTD also uses code generation.

>From what I can tell about aspect-oriented programming (about which I am
still fuzzy), database and XML wrappers are good candidates for AO
techniques, and a specific metaclass can implement many of the ideas
behind AO (though maybe coming from a slightly different angle).  But at
the moment I only have a vague intuition about what problems are
appropriate for AO programming, ditto metaclasses.

  Ian