I had found the first thread you linked. I see what you mean about
the
cure -- my general belief is that *I* am unlikely to have problems for which meta-classes are really the best solution :-)
Once you get used to them meta-classes are very useful. In fact I have never built an industrial size OO system yet that did not use meta classes somewhere in the design...
And if you program in OO in Smalltalk, CLOS or Objective C its hard to escape them. They really aren't that difficult once you wrap your head around the concept. OTOH I've never actually got round to trying to use them in Python yet... :-)
Alan G.
Hi Alan,
thanks for the reply.
I can see why they'd be useful. But, as my OO code is at best cottage industry size ;-) I've yet to find I needed them. The couple of times I've been tempted to work out the details of using them for a real case of my own I recalled Eric Raymond's comment:
Why Python? | Linux Journal
"This kind of thing is called metaclass hacking and is generally considered fearsomely esoteric--deep black magic. "
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882
and decided to think harder to see if I could find another way. So far, that's worked :-)
But, thanks for the encouragement to take them on.
Best,
Brian vdB _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
