__getattribute__ for operators

Michael gundlach at gmail.com
Sat Apr 18 13:29:01 EDT 2009


While thinking about Steven D'Aprano's thread about automatically
generating arithmetic operations for a subclass, I stumbled upon
something confusing.  Having defined the following class to do funky
addition,

class MyInt(int):
    def __getattribute__(self, key):
        if key == "__add__":
            print("In __getattribute__('__add__')")
            return lambda other: MyInt(int.__add__(self, other+100))
        else:
            return object.__getattribute__(self, key)

    def __getattr__(self, key):
        if key == "__add__":
            print("In __getattr__('__add__')")
            return lambda other: MyInt(int.__add__(self, other+100))
        else:
            return object.__getattr__(self, key)

I then do this:

>>> a = MyInt(4)
>>> a.__add__(2)
In __getattribute__('__add__')
106
>>> a + 2
6
>>>

Why doesn't "a + 2" look up the __add__ attribute and use my lambda?
If I manually define __add__(self, other) then "a + 2" will of course
use that method.

Michael



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