Finding the name of a class

[Shane Hathaway]

John Salerno wrote:
> Shane Hathaway wrote:
> 
>> Don't forget to file a bug.
> 
> I'm reluctant to call it a bug just yet. Here's more stuff below. 
> There's obviously a difference between old- and new-style classes. It 
> seems that as far as new-style is concerned, __name__ is an attribute of 
> __class__ (along with a bunch of other stuff), but not of Foo itself.

I'm not sure what you're saying.  The class of a class is the 'type' 
builtin, unless metaclasses are involved.  So your expression 
"dir(Foo.__class__)" is equivalent to "dir(type)", and the 'type' 
builtin happens to have a __name__ attribute that dir() notices.  Take a 
look:

 >>> class Foo(object):
...   pass
...
 >>> Foo.__class__ is type
True
 >>> Foo.__name__
'Foo'
 >>> Foo.__class__.__name__
'type'

The bug is that the expression "dir(someclass)", where the class is a 
user-defined class of either new or old style, never reveals to the user 
that the class object has a __name__ attribute.  I tested this with 
Python versions 2.3 through 2.5b1.  This is an education issue; since 
that important attribute is not in the list, newcomers are not likely to 
discover it, and may instead use strange incantations to get the name of 
a class.

Do you want me to file the bug?

Shane