"Stephen McInerney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > Eric, you misunderstood my point. > I said you make a **token** assignment in the class defn simply > to do two things: > - 1) identify all the members in one place > - 2) annotate each member's type, as much as you can
I'm sure Eric can explain for himself but what I think he was saying was that his classes define themselves at runtime. They read the names of the fields and type information from the database metadata and create the attributes accordingly. Thus he doesn't know what his class attributes will be until the program runs. He may not even know the names of his classes until he reads the database tablenames. This is exactly the kind of tricky coding that is possible in a dynamic language which is next tio impossible in static compiled code, unless you write your own 'little language interpreter' inside the compiled program. This kind of abstract meta programming is extremely tricky to get right but at least it's possible in something like Python. But it makes analyzing the code very complex since much of the working code is being created by the config code at runtime. I've never actually tried this in Python but have done similar things in Lisp. In C++ you usually have to create classes in advance for every possible eventuality then use a factory class (or big switch statement) to create the desitred instances. That's a lot of excess code which is still less reliable and robust. Of course I could be misreading Eric's intent... Alan G. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
