Distinguishing attributes and methods

[Roy Smith]

In article <475b17dc$0$31712$426a74cc at news.free.fr>,
 Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.quelquechose at free.quelquepart.fr> wrote:

> MonkeeSage a écrit :
> > On Dec 8, 2:51 pm, Glenn Hutchings <zond... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > 
> >>On Dec 8, 7:44 pm, MonkeeSage <MonkeeS... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>I think it muddies the water to say that a.a() and a.a are the same
> >>>thing--obviously they are not.
> >>
> >>A thing is not what it is;
> >>A thing is what it does.
> >>This is the Way of the Duck.
> >>
> >>    -- Basho (in his "3 extra syllables" phase)
> > 
> > 
> > Bah. Type-by-behavior never impressed me much. And I still think that
> > a.a is semantically different from a.a() in python.
> 
> It is indeed and very obviously semantically different, and no one said 
> it wasn't. The first is an attribute lookup, the second is an attribute 
> lookup followed by a call. Now this doesn't make the attribute lookup 
> part different in both cases...

There are a very few corner cases were you can leave the ()'s out.  For 
example, you can do;

raise Exception

or

raise Exception()

but stuff like that is very much a wart in the language syntax.