"John O'Hagan" <resea...@johnohagan.com> writes:
>IMO one of the benefits of subclassing is that you can just "bolt on" >additional behaviour without having to know all the inner workings of the >superclass, a benefit that is somewhat defeated by this behaviour of builtins. I agree. I've read the old post/articles by GvR and other over how great it will be now that one can subclass Python builtin types like any other class (GvR even gives explicit examples of this luscious possibility in his paper on type/class unification). But now I'm discovering so many caveats, exceptions, and gotchas about subclassing builtins that I have to conclude that this much celebrated new capability is basically useless... Just like "readability counts", it is also true that "conceptual clarity" counts, and treating builtins as classes in Python is the most obfuscated design I've ever seen. UserDict, come back, all is forgotten! ~kj -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
