Is it possible to delete a method from an object (not class) in python?

Question

I have a class with a few methods, some of which are only valid when the object is in a particular state. I would like to have the methods simply not be bound to the objects

Answer 1

As an additional possibility (twisting the question a little bit), if it makes more sense to only have certain methods on certain instances, you can always add those methods in the __init__ of the class to those instances for which it makes sense. Ex: say we have your Wizard class, and the only time a Wizard instance should have the domagic() method is if a magic parameter passed to __init__() is True. We could then do something like:

class Wizard(object):
    def __init__(self, magic = False):
        if magic:
            def _domagic():
                print "DOING MAGIC!"
            self.domagic = _domagic

def main():
    mage = Wizard(magic = True)
    nomage = Wizard(magic = False)

    mage.domagic()      # prints "DOING MAGIC!"
    nomage.domagic()    # throws an AttributeError

Having said that, this code does have a bit of smell to it -- now before you call domagic() on a Wizard, you need to know if the method is defined or not. I wonder if the inheritance heirarchy could be refined a bit to make this a bit more elegant.