accessing class attributes

[Matimus]

> I have a game class, and the game has a state. Seeing that Python has
> no enumeration type, at first I used strings to represent states:
> "paused", "running", etc. But such a representation has many
> negatives, so I decided to look at the Enum implementation given here:http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/413486


I frequently use strings in place of enumeration in python. I have
found it to be very useful. I'm curious about the _many negatives_ you
have found?

For example, I wrote a module and one of the parameters to a function
was `mode`. Two of the modes were ALL_MODE and ONE_MODE.

At first I enumerated the modes:

MODES = ALL_MODE, ONE_MODE = 0, 1

And code using the mode tended to look something like this:

from package import module
module.foo(mode=module.ALL_MODE)

Of course, the following would also work, but isn't self descriptive:

module.foo(mode=0)

Then, after some user feedback I changed it to this:

MODES = ALL_MODE, ONE_MODE = "all one".split()

This maintained backwards compatabilty, but users could use the much
more concise (but still readable) version:

module.foo(mode="all")

Since then, I have adopted using strings in place of enum types as a
best practice.

Matt