how to get names of attributes

[Charles T. Smith]

Hi,

How can I get *all* the names of an object's attributes?  I have legacy 
code with mixed new style classes and old style classes and I need to 
write methods which deal with both.  That's the immediate problem, but 
I'm always running into the need to understand how objects are linked, in 
particular when in pdb.  The answers one always sees on StackOverflow is 
that you don't need to understand, understanding is not the pythonic way 
to do things.

Alternatively, is there are map documented somewhere - more complete than
python/python-2.7.3-docs-html/library/stdtypes.html?
highlight=class#special-attributes

Or, is the code available uncompiled somewhere on my machine?

Does anyone know *why* the __members__ method was deprecated, to be 
replaced by dir(), which doesn't tell the truth (if only it took an 
optional parameter to say: "be truthful")

cts