Re: empty classes as c structs?

[Steven Bethard]

Nick Coghlan wrote:
By assigning to __dict__ directly, you can use the attribute view either 
as it's own dictionary (by not supplying one, or supplying a new one), 
or as a convenient way to programmatically modify an existing one. For 
example, you could use it to easily bind globals without needing the 
'global' keyword:

Py> class attr_view(object):
...     def __init__(self, data):
...         self.__dict__ = data
...
Py> def f():
...   gbls = attr_view(globals())
...   gbls.x = 5
...
Py> x
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
NameError: name 'x' is not defined
Py> f()
Py> x
5
Hmm... interesting.  This isn't the main intended use of 
Bunch/Struct/whatever, but it does seem like a useful thing to have... 
I wonder if it would be worth having, say, a staticmethod of Bunch that 
produced such a view, e.g.:

class Bunch(object):
    ...
    @staticmethod
    def view(data):
        result = Bunch()
        result.__dict__ = data
        return result
Then you could write your code as something like:
gbls = Bunch.view(globals())
I'm probably gonna need more feedback though from people though to know 
if this is a commonly desired use case...

Steve
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