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Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 22:12:51 -0700
Subject: Re: Instances' __setitem__ methods
From: Chris Rebert <clp2@rebertia.com>
To: Spencer Pearson <speeze.pearson@gmail.com>
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On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Spencer Pearson
<speeze.pearson@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was recently trying to implement a dict-like object which would do
> some fancy stuff when it was modified, and found that overriding the
> __setitem__ method of an instance did not act the way I expected. The
> help documentation (from help(dict.__setitem__)) claims that
> "d.__setitem__(k,v)" is equivalent to "d[k]=v", but I've produced this
> code that, on Python 2.6, acts differently in the two cases.

Technically, the strict equivalence is only one-way, as you've shown;
but one generally avoids calling the __magic__ methods directly, so
this subtle distinction is seldom used intentionally.

<snip>
> I would expect the two setitems to both call print_args, but that's
> not what happens. In the first case, it calls print_args, but in the
> second case, the __setitem__ declared in MyDict is called instead.
>
> The documentation at http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#specialnames
> says that for new-style classes, "x[i]" is equivalent to
> "type(x).__getitem__(x, i)". I assume that "x[i]=y" has similarly been
> changed to be equivalent to "type(x).__setitem__(x, i, y)", since that
> would produce the results that I'm getting. Is the help documentation
> for dict.__setitem__ just outdated, or am I missing some subtlety
> here?

The sentence of the docs in question begins with "For instance,";
hence, __setitem__ is just the arbitrarily-chosen example used in this
part of the docs. But the point applies equally to all the special
methods. See the very last section of the same webpage:
http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#special-method-lookup-for-new-style-classes

> Also: when I say "d.f(*args)", am I correct in thinking that d checks
> to see if it has an instance attribute called "f", and if it does,
> calls f(*args); and if it doesn't, checks whether its parent class
> (and then its grandparent, and so on) has a class attribute called
> "f", and if it does, calls f(x, *args)?

See the first paragraph under the "Classes" entry on
http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#objects-values-and-types
for perfect accuracy.

Cheers,
Chris