On 03/17/2010 05:59 AM, Jason Tackaberry wrote: > On Tue, 2010-03-16 at 10:04 +0100, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: >> Answer here: >> >> http://wiki.python.org/moin/FromFunctionToMethod > > I have a sense I used to know this once upon a time, but the question > came to my mind (possibly again) and I couldn't think of an answer: > > Why not create the bound methods at instantiation time, rather than > using the descriptor protocol which has the overhead of creating a new > bound method each time the method attribute is accessed?
Because people wanted it like so. There was once, a time when python doesn't have the descriptor protocol (old-style classes) and many people feels that a high-level language like python should provide some additional hooks for customizing attribute access which the existing solutions like __getattr__ and __setattr__ couldn't easily provide. The result is new-style class. Most people probably would never need to use descriptor protocol directly, since the immediate benefit of descriptor protocol are property(), classmethod(), and instancemethod() decorators which, without descriptor protocol, would never become a possibility. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
