Venerable Pythonistas, Looks like a pretty unanimous vote in favour of custom descriptor usage rather than the more generic property() BIF for my purposes.
This is going to tidy and firm up my library code very nicely ;-) Thanks very much for your responses. Your assistance is greatly appreciated! P.S. How did my post manage to ignite a mini flame war?! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
