What is a property object?

Question

I am not new to python, but I have a pretty basic question here.

I was playing around with python and found that there is the type property

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Answer 1

The property object is what you are actually thinking of as a property. Consider this example:

class Foo(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self._bar = 0

    @property
    def bar(self):
        return self._bar + 5

Foo.bar is a property object which has a __get__ method. When you write something like

x = Foo()
print(x.bar)

the lookup for x.bar finds that type(x).bar has a __get__ method, and so the attribute lookup becomes equivalent to

type(x).bar.__get__(x, type(x))

which produces the value x._bar + 5.

The use of property as a decorator somewhat obscures the fact that bar is a property object. An equivalent defintion is

class Foo(object):
     def __init__(self):
         self._bar = 0

     bar = property(lambda self: self._bar + 5)

which shows more explicitly that you are creating a property object with the given lambda expression as the getter for that property, and binding the object to the class attribute bar.

The property class (along with instance methods, class methods, and static methods) is a specific application of Python's general descriptor protocol, which defines the behavior of class attributes with __get__, __set__, and/or __del__ methods.