new style shelve implementation

[Nicholas Wieland]

I'm using the shelve module for a program I'm writing, and reading the
source I've noted that shelve doesn't use new style classes.
Well, this is the first time I use *seriously* new style classes (I work
primarly on Zope and Python 2.1), so the result is probably far from
production code, but after half an hour of hacking my Shelf class seems to
work like the original one (much more than what I expected...) :)

class Shelf (dict):

def __init__ (self, dict, protocol = None, writeback = False, binary = None):
self.dict = dict
if protocol is not None and binary is not None:
raise ValueError, "can't specifiy both 'protocol' and 'binary'"
if binary is not None:
warnings.warn ("The 'binary' argument to Shelf() is deprecated",
PendingDeprecat ionWarning)
protocol = int (binary)
if protocol is None:
protocol = 0
self.protocol = protocol
self.writeback = writeback
self.cache = {}

def __repr__ (self):
dummy = dict ()
for k in self.keys ():
dummy [k] = self [k]
return repr (dummy)

def keys (self):
return self.dict.keys ()

def __len__ (self):
return len (self)

def has_key (self, key):
return self.dict.has_k ey (key)

def __contains__ (self, key):
return self.has_key (key)

def get (self, key, default = None):
if self.has_key (key):
return self.dict [key]
return default

def __getitem__ (self, key):
try:
value = self.cache [key]
except KeyError:
f = StringIO (self.dict [key])
value = Unpickler (f).load ()
if self.writeback:
self.cache [key] = value
return value

def __setitem__ (self, key, value):
if self.writeback:
self.cache [key] = value
f = StringIO ()
p = Pickler (f, self.protocol)
p.dump (value)
self.dict [key] = f.getvalue ()

def __delitem__ (self, key):
del self.dict [key]
try:
del self.cache [key]
except KeyError:
pass

def close (self):
self.sync ()
try:
self.dict.close ()
except AttributeError:
pass
self = None

def __del__ (self):
self.close ()

def sync (self):
if self.writeback and self.cache:
self.writeback = False
for key, entry in self.cache.iter items ():
self.dict [key] = entry
self.writeback = True
self.cache = {}
if hasattr (self.dict, "sync"):
self.sync ()

Everything else is like the original one, I've just added a totally
unpythonic implementation of the __repr__ method and removed the UserDict
dependency.
IMVHO if UserDict is going to be removed it's good to start removing
it from the python library.
On the other hand, this is just a dirty hack, so every comment is deeply
appreciated.

Happy new year,
nicholas