examining python objects

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

Is there a function/class/module/whatever I can use to
look at objects?  I want something that will print the object's
value (if any) in pretty-printed form, and list all it's attributes
and their values.  And do all that recursively.
I want to be able to find out everything about an object that
Python can introspectively find out.

Something like the 'x' command does in the Perl debugger.

Anything like this exist?  (And why isn't something like this
already in pdb?)