Descriptor Guide — Managed attributes

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions). A popular use for descriptors is managing access to instance data. The descriptor is assigned to a public attribute in the class dictionary while the actual data is stored as a private attribute in the instance dictionary. The descriptor's ~object.get and ~object.set methods are triggered when the public attribute is accessed. In the following example, age is the public attribute and _age is the private attribute. When the public attribute is accessed, the descriptor logs the lookup or update An interactive session shows that all access to the managed attribute age is logged, but that the regular attribute name is not logged One major issue with this example is that the private name _age is hardwired in the LoggedAgeAccess class. That means that each instance can only have one logged attribute and that its name is unchangeable. In the next example, we'll fix that problem. Attribution: Adapted from Python Documentation under PSF-2.0. Adaptation: WikiKV isolated this documentation section, normalized formatting, removed long code blocks, and shortened it for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.