Inheritable Slots Metaclass

[Carl Banks]

On May 26, 9:55 pm, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't want to sound to pessimistic about it, I really wouldn't mind
> a metaclass that makes slots more normal; but you have work to do.


Just as a minor followup, I'll mention that slots and inheritance have
some issues that aren't going to be resolvable to everyone's
satisfaction, and that's another reason why I don't think slots should
be accessible by default.

For instance, some might assume that deriving from a class with slots
automatically grants the derived class the same optimization that the
base class has.  Others will not even consider that the base class has
slots and will assume that their derived class has dynamic attributes
like most other Python classes.  Who's right?

I'd go with the former, for the same reason you gave, but the latter
is not unreasonable.  type does the latter.

The best answer might be to always insist on an explicit declaration
one way or another, but that makes it prone to other problems like
forward compatibility issues.  Point is, it's not a simple thing.


Carl Banks