Question

I’m trying to access attributes of member functions, but I cannot understand why I can access only through the __dict__.

class A(object):
    def fA(self):
        print A.fA.x 
    fA.x = 2

A.fA.__dict__['x'] = 3 
#A.fa.x #AttributeError: 'instancemethod' object has no attribute 'x'
A.fA.x = 4 

Why I do get an AttributeError if I try to access ‘directly’?

Answer 1

Because of how instancemethod objects are implemented. They use a non-standard attribute-getter which doesn’t allow access to non-standard attributes.