Question

When I try to use introspection to look at what methods are available on threading.Lock I don’t see what I would expect.

Specifically I don’t see acquire, release or locked. Why is this?

Here’s what I do see:

>>> dir (threading.Lock) ['__call__', '__class__', '__cmp__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__name__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__self__', '__setattr__', '__str__'] 

Answer 1

You’re doing it wrong. threading.Lock is not an object.

>>> import threading >>> threading.Lock <built-in function allocate_lock> >>> type(threading.Lock) <type 'builtin_function_or_method'> >>> x=threading.Lock() >>> type(x) <type 'thread.lock'> >>> dir(x) ['__enter__', '__exit__', 'acquire', 'acquire_lock', 'locked', 'locked_lock', 'release', 'release_lock'] >>>