It's ok to __slots__ for what they were intended

[John Nagle]

Chris Mellon wrote:
> On 20 Dec 2007 19:50:31 -0800, Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:
>> In article <0829587b-f3a1-4f77-86a1-163e7bcc54d2 at l32g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,
>> Carl Banks  <pavlovevidence at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Someday I'll have time to write up a proper page about why you shouldn't
>>>> use __slots__....

> Barking out your blanket warning in a thread on *the exact use case
> slots were implemented to address* just makes you look like a mindless
> reactionary. Stick to posting your warning in threads where people ask
> how to stop "other people" from setting attributes on "their"
> instances.

     Agreed.

     I'd like to hear more about what kind of performance gain can be
obtained from "__slots__".  I'm looking into ways of speeding up
HTML parsing via BeautifulSoup.  If a significant speedup can be
obtained when navigating large trees of small objects, that's worth
quite a bit to me.

				John Nagle
				SiteTruth