Steven D'Aprano wrote:
If some methods can be defined outside of the body of a class, then being defined inside the body of a class does not define a method.
Nobody's disputing that. The business about super() is just a possible reason for the glossary to define the word 'method' in a more restricted way -- because it simplifies the wording of *other* parts of the docs that talk about super(). Another thing to consider is that while tricks like manually inserting __class__ into a function may work today with CPython, they might not work in future versions or other implementations. So there are good reasons for the docs to be conservative about what they promise. Also, with Python being so dynamic, just about *anything* you can say about its usual behaviour can be circumvented with enough hackery. If the docs were to pedantically take all of those possibilities into account at every turn, they would be so dense and impenetrable as to be nearly useless to anyone other than language lawyers. All this started when I pointed out that *if* you take the glossary definition of the term 'method' at its word, then what the docs say about the __dir__ method won't lead you to think that attaching it to an instance would work. That's true regardless of whether you think the glossary definition is too restrictive or not. I wouldn't have thought that this obvservation would be so controversial. But maybe I'm wrong, and Python really is doomed -- to death by language lawyering!-) -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
