Best way to do attribute docstrings?

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:41:31 -0300, Ken Kuhlman <kskuhlman at gmail.com>  
escribi�:

> Replying to myself in case someone finds this interesting.
>
> Anyway, I took another shot at this with a little fresher mind, and it
> was quickly obvious that I was trying to force attributes to behave
> more like classes.  It was a small step from there to creating a
> factory function to return instances of the appropriate class.  I'm
> much happier with the result than either of the two previously posted
> kludges.

Still there is something I don't understand on your design. You appear to  
be always concerned about *class* attributes. *Instance* attributes are  
far more comon, and usually they change their value many times.

> class Animal(object):
>     four_legs = attr(value = True, doc = "Animal has four legs")
>     favorite_food = attr('cheese', doc = "Animal's favorite food")
>     has_fur = attr(False)
>     has_fur.__doc__ "Animal has fur"

As an example, how would you annotate attributes on a hierarchy like this?

class Animal(object):
     can_fly = False # no Animal can fly unless explicitely noted
     lives = 1 # most Animals have a single life
     def __init__(self, color, legs, favorite_food):
         self.color = color
         self.legs = legs
         self.favorite_food = favorite_food

class Mammal(Animal):
     pass

class Cat(Mammal):
     def __init__(self, color):
         Mammal.__init__(self, color=color, legs=4, favorite_food='mice')
         self.lives = 7 # a cat starts with 7 lives

class Mouse(Mammal):
     def __init__(self, color, personality):
         Mammal.__init__(self, color=color, legs=4, favorite_food='cheese')
         self.personality = personality

class Bird(Animal):
     can_fly = True
     def __init__(self, color):
         Animal.__init__(self, color=color, legs=2, favorite_food='seed')

tweety = Bird('yellow')
sylvester = Cat('black')
tom = Cat('blue')
jerry = Mouse('brown', 'nice')
itchy = Mouse('blue', 'sadist')
scratchy = Cat('black')
scratchy.lives = 7**7 # or so...

print tweety.legs
print scratchy.color
print scratchy.lives

-- 
Gabriel Genellina