It seems that I've got a short-circuit somewhere here. I understand that everything is an object and the the storage/lookup system is object-agnostic, and that it is only the descriptors (or "tags" as I called them generically) that determine how an attribute is bound, whether it is bound at all, whether it is even callable, and so forth. So, when I say that all callable attributes (or to be more precise, all callable attributes bound to objects other than toplevel) are "methods," what am I missing?
You said "the difference [between a callable attribute and a method] is the specific implementation of the attribute's class"...but this almost sounds like type-by-primitive (a method is a method when it derives from a certain base class), or type-by-behavior (a method is a method when it behaves in a certain way, e.g., responds in a certain way to a query). Is this correct? Shouldn't it be type-by-capability/ interface--i.e., it implements the protocol of a callable, therefore, formally, it is not meaningfully different from any other callable (quacks like a duck and all)? I guess what I'm asking is, in what way is a "method" (or "function") semantically different from a home-brewed callable I concoct and bind to an object (or toplevel)? What is the distinction that I'm missing? Ps. wrt your last comment, isn't a class object in essence a factory method? Regards, Jordan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
