Make dir() wordier (see the new docstring). The new behavior is a mixed
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.
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 55e2993..a1557f8 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -3,6 +3,23 @@
Core
+- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
+ more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
+ reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
+ classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
+ an empty list. In 2.2a3,
+
+ >>> dir([])
+ ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
+ '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
+ '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
+ '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
+ '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
+ 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
+ 'reverse', 'sort']
+
+ dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
+
- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for