Mastering Object-oriented Python

The __getattribute__() method

An even lower level attribute processing is the __getattribute__() method. The default implementation attempts to locate the value as an existing attribute in the internal __dict__ (or __slots__). If the attribute is not found, it calls __getattr__() as a fallback. If the value located is a descriptor (see in the following Creating descriptors section), then it processes the descriptor. Otherwise, the value is simply returned.

By overriding this method, we can perform any of the following kinds of tasks:

• We can effectively prevent access to attributes. This method, by raising an exception instead of returning a value, can make an attribute more secret than if we were to merely use the leading underscore (_) to mark ...