Can anyone explain why descriptors only work when they are an attribute to an object or class. I think a lot of interesting things one can do with descriptors would be just as interesting if the object stood on itself instead of being an attribute to an other object.
How would that work?
Well AFAIU a descriptor is an object with at least one method out of __get__, __set__ or __del__. I don see why implicitly calling one of these methods would be any more difficult when they are autonomous objects than when they are attributes.
I guess properties are really a feature of the class, not of the attribute. Certain operations on objects of the class (getattr, setattr, delattr) have to be intercepted. If you want to have this for general variable access, you 'd have to intercept all accesses to local and module name spaces. This slows things down a lot. And many think that overloading assignment is a bad idea. You probably find some dicussions when searching for "overloading assignment" in the newsgroup archive.
>>>to an object or class. I think a lot of interesting things one can
As in the chinese curse "May you live in interisting times"?
Daniel -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
