Mix-In Class Methods At Run-Time

[digitalorganics at gmail.com]

This looks excellent bearophile, but I'm having trouble understanding
some things. Perhaps you can help wipe clean my ignorance. Firstly, I
thought __classes__ was a read-only attribute? Secondly, what is a
"dictproxy object" and why won't the following code work:

class Cat:
    def meow(self):
        print "meow"
def MixIn(object, *classes):
    temp = type('ClassPie', (object.__class__,) + classes, {})
    temp.__dict__.update([object.__dict__])
NewClass = MixIn(Cat(), C, D)
test = NewClass()

__dict__, to my understanding, is suppose to be a dictionary, but
Python keeps telling me it's a 'dictproxy' object and that it has no
attribute 'update'. Why is this?

Thanks.


bearophileHUGS at lycos.com wrote:
> I think it's possible, most of such kind of things are possible with
> Python.
> I'm not an expert yet in such kind of things, so this can be a starting
> point for you (note the shadowing of m2, the class docstrings, etc).
> Other people can give you something better or more correct.
>
> class A:
>     def m1(self): return "m1"
>     def m2(self): return "m2"
>
> class B:
>     def m3(self): return "m3"
>
> class P:
>     def m2(self): return "m2b"
>     def m4(self): return"m4"
>
> def mixin(object, *classes):
>     class NewClass(object.__class__):
>         pass
>     for C in classes:
>         NewClass.__dict__.update(C.__dict__)
>     object.__class__ = NewClass
>
> foo = P()
> print "Before:"
> print "foo.__class__.__dict__.keys():", foo.__class__.__dict__.keys()
> print "P.__dict__.keys():", P.__dict__.keys()
> print "foo.m2():", foo.m2()
> print "foo.m4():", foo.m4(), "\n"
>
> mixin(foo, A, B)
>
> print "After:"
> print "foo.__class__.__dict__.keys():", foo.__class__.__dict__.keys()
> print "P.__dict__.keys():", P.__dict__.keys()
> print "foo.m1():", foo.m1()
> print "foo.m2():", foo.m2()
> print "foo.m3():", foo.m3()
> print "foo.m4():", foo.m4()
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile