accessors and lazy initialization

[Bill]

Hello --

I'm a Java programmer who's slowly getting up to speed in Python. In
general I try to initialize the state of my objects as late as
possible, in the accessor. So if I have a member "_foo", my accessor
is something like:

public FooType getFoo() {
if (_foo == null) {
// initialize _foo here
}
return _foo;
}

I'd like to do lazy initialization in Python as well:

def getFoo():
try:
return _foo
except AttributeError:
# initialize _foo here
return _foo

This seems a little clunky. Is there a more Pythonic way of looking at
this?

Thanks -- Bill.

[Rene Pijlman]

Bill:

In general I try to initialize the state of my objects as late as
possible, in the accessor. [...]
Is there a more Pythonic way of looking at this?

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Coo.../Recipe/131495
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Coo.../Recipe/363602

--
René Pijlman

[Neil Dunn]

The second version seems the most sensible. Remeber this is python,
properties are more sensible then getters and setters.