[Tutor] __slots__

[Kent Johnson]

Mike Hansen wrote:
>>From:
>>Kent Johnson <kent37 at tds.net>
>>I think the conventional advice is something like, if you don't 
>>understand why using slots is a bad idea, you have no business using 
>>them :-)
>>
> Can you tell us the pros and cons of using slots? 

I think I am in the group of people who have no business using __slots__ ;-)
What I gather from discussions on comp.lang.python is that really the only good reason for using __slots__ is for the memory optimization when you have huge numbers of objects instantiated.

There are quite a few gotchas in the docs and more discussed in c.l.p.
Search c.l.p for __slots__ to find discussion...

Kent

> Although I haven't used them 
> yet, they seem like a way to lock down a class so you don't accidentally add new 
> attributes to that class. (emp.name vs emp.nmae) Might be handy when working on 
> a team too. Although something like Pychecker would most likely catch those 
> accidents. <shrug> I dunno.
> 
> Mike
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