Invisible function attributes

[Olivier Lefevre]

Python 2.3

def foo(): .... foo.a = 1
.... vars(foo) {} foo()
vars(foo) {'a': 1}

So it would appear that function attributes are not really
there until the first call to the function. If that is the
intended behaviour, it is really weird. I couldn't find any
explicit discussion of this topic in the LRM.

Thanks if anyone can shed some light on this,

-- O.L.

[John J. Lee]

Crumbs, is this thread still running?

le******@yahoo. com (Olivier Lefevre) writes:

Python has no declarations, only executable statements.
I think this was the key to my confusion in this case.

Certainly part of it.

>> bar(4)

Traceback (most recent call last):
TypeError: 'int' object has only read-only attributes (assign to .a)

The way I read this, it says that a was bound to the name foo,

I'm not sure what's in your mind, and I'm only looking at this one
message (the rest aren't in my newsreader) but that traceback says you
tried to assign to an attribute on an integer, like so:

3.a = "bananas"
Doesn't make a lot of sense!

(Of course, you probably were assigning to a named integer, not a
literal

foo = 3
foo.a = "bananas"
)

[...] OTOH I read the func attr PEP and it says that they are
implemented via a dict inside the function object. If so,
shouldn't they be bound to the function object rather than
to its name??
They are.

Or is func_dict itself an attribute?

It is.
John