Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> writes: > On Thu, 31 Dec 2015 10:13 am, Ben Finney wrote: > > > You may be familiar with other languages where the distinction > > between “attribute of an object” is not distinct from “item in a > > dictionary”. Python is not one of those languages; the distinction > > is real and important. > > I'm not sure what distinction you're referring to, can you explain?
Tersely: the relationship between an object and its attributes, is not the same as the relationship between a dictionary and its items. > Obviously there is a syntax difference between x.attr and x['key'] Not merely syntax; the attributes of an object are not generally available as items of the container. > but attributes *are* items in a dictionary That's like saying everything in Python is a number: it conflates the implementation with the semantics. The distinction between a Python integer and a Python boolean value is real and important, despite the incidental fact of their both being implemented as numbers. > Either the instance __dict__, the class __dict__, or a superclass > __dict__. No, I'm not referring to the ‘__dict__’ attribute of an object; I'm referring to the object itself. To talk about the attributes of an object ‘foo’ is distinct from talking about the items in a dictionary ‘foo’. That distinction is real, and important. -- \ “… correct code is great, code that crashes could use | `\ improvement, but incorrect code that doesn’t crash is a | _o__) horrible nightmare.” —Chris Smith, 2008-08-22 | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
