Correction for ‘Python’s Innards: Objects 102’

Alas, it has happened, the first mistake in the ‘Python’s Innards’ series has been found. I was trying to answer a question raised by one of my Reddit readers regarding properties, and realized that I have overlooked a fine point about descriptors in my post. Oops.

As was originally (and correctly) written in the post, descriptors are objects whose type has their tp_descr_get and/or tp_descr_set slots set to non-NULL. However, I also wrote, incorrectly, that descriptors take precedence over regular instance attributes (i.e., attributes in the object’s __dict__). This is partly correct but misleading, as it doesn’t distinguish non-data descriptors from data-descriptors. An object is said to be a data descriptor if its type has its tp_descr_set slot implemented (there’s no particularly special term for a non-data descriptor). Only data descriptors override regular object attributes, non-data descriptors do not.

I apologize for the mistake, but alas can’t promise it will never happen again. I’ve created an Errata Policy page which explains how I intend to treat mistakes that will be found from now on. Briefly, it says that the policy is to correct the original page as if the mistake never existed, and if the mistake is significant enough, also write a separate post (like this one) which explains what happened. I plan not to tag errata posts with all the tags of the original post (I’ve done it with this post as an exception), so unless you explicitly register to the RSS feed of the Errata category in my blog, you won’t get further errata via Planet Python or other aggregation services that rely on the ‘python’ or ‘pythons-innards’ tags.

I hope you will keep enjoying and relying on this blog.