What do you call a class not intended to be instantiated

[Roy Smith]

In article <gblea5$os6$1 at panix3.panix.com>, aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) 
wrote:

> One cute reason to prefer class singletons to module singletons is that
> subclassing works well for creating multiple singletons.  But really,
> the main reason I use class singletons is that they are the absolute
> simplest way to get attribute access:
> 
> class Foo: pass
> Foo.bar = 'xyz'
> if data == Foo.bar:
>     print "!"

I've often done something similar, creating a dummy class:

class Data:
   pass

just so I could create instances of it to hang attributes off of:

foo = Data()
foo.bar = 'xyz'

That's a trick I've been using since the Old Days (i.e. before new-style 
classes came along).  When I saw your example, my first thought was "That's 
silly, now that there's new-style classes, you can just create an instance 
of object!".  Unfortunately, when I tried it, I discovered it didn't work.  
You *can* instantiate object, but you don't get a class instance, so you 
can't create attributes on it.

>>> x = object()
>>> type(x)
<type 'object'>
>>> x.foo = 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'object' object has no attribute 'foo'