horridly inefficient hack in regrtest's Compare class, but it's about as
clean as can be: regrtest has to set up the Compare instance before
importing a test module, and by the time the module *is* imported it's too
late to change that decision. The good news is that the more tests we
convert to unittest and doctest, the less the inefficiency here matters.
Even now there are few tests with large expected-output files (the new
cost here is a Python-level call per .write() when there's an expected-
output file).
bag. It's clearly wrong for classic classes, at heart because a classic
class doesn't have a __class__ attribute, and I'm unclear on whether
that's feature or bug. I'll repair this once I find out (in the
meantime, dir() applied to classic classes won't find the base classes,
while dir() applied to a classic-class instance *will* find the base
classes but not *their* base classes).
Please give the new dir() a try and see whether you love it or hate it.
The new dir([]) behavior is something I could come to love. Here's
something to hate:
>>> class C:
... pass
...
>>> c = C()
>>> dir(c)
['__doc__', '__module__']
>>>
The idea that an instance has a __doc__ attribute is jarring (of course
it's really c.__class__.__doc__ == C.__doc__; likewise for __module__).
OTOH, the code already has too many special cases, and dir(x) doesn't
have a compelling or clear purpose when x isn't a module.
Tim Peters
Guido van Rossum