Python Programming On Win32

Other Built-in Types

The interpreter supports several other kinds of objects. Most of these support only one or two operations.

Modules

The only special operation on a module is attribute access: m .name, where m is a module and name accesses a name defined in m ’s symbol table. The import statement is not, strictly speaking, an operation on a module object; import foo doesn’t require a module object named foo to exist, rather it requires an (external) definition for a module named foo somewhere.

A special member of every module is __dict__. This is the dictionary containing the module’s symbol table. Modifying this dictionary changes the module’s symbol table, but direct assignment to the __dict__ attribute isn’t possible (i.e., you can write m.__dict_ _['a'] = 1, which defines m.a to be 1, but you can’t write m.__dict__ = {}.

Modules built into the interpreter are written like this: <module 'sys' (built-in)>. If loaded from a file, they are written as <module 'os' from '/usr/local/lib/python1.5/os.pyc'>.

Classes and class instances

See Chapters 3 and 7 of the Python reference manual.

Functions

Function objects are created by function definitions. The only operation on a function object is to call it: func(argument-list).

There are really two flavors of function objects, built-in functions and user-defined functions. Both support the same operation (to call the function), but the implementation is different, hence the different object types.

The implementation adds two special read-only ...