The Magick of __call__ (Or, Digging Deeper Than I Ought To)

[Chris Angelico]

Thanks for those explanations! As Corey's original subject says, this
IS digging pretty deep into implementation details. My geekly side
loves that though!

On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> Every time a method is accessed through an instance, a new wrapper is
> created. Why? 1. If you want to reuse a bound methods, just bind it to a
> name or something and reuse it. 2. To automatically keep it for possible
> reuse, which normally is not too common, it wold have to be kept in some
> hidden dict which would grow indefinitely unless pruned occasionally.

What I was thinking was something along the lines of a loop-back
reference in the wrapper itself. So for instance:

Foo.__call__ = wrapper(Foo)

The wrapper would be created with a __call__ method of itself:
self.__call__ = self

That would not require a dictionary, it's just a special case of
creating the __call__ method. Since, apparently, we can "go infinite"
with the __call__ dereferencing, these objects must be created when
referenced?

Fascinating stuff!

Chris Angelico