[Pyobjc-dev] Access to 'hidden' class-methods

[Ronald O. <ous...@ci...>]

Some time ago there was a discussion about access to class-methods with 
the same name as an instance-method. Currently this is not possible.

One of suggestions was to add pyobjc-specific attributes to proxy 
objects. I've implemented, but not yet fully tested this. After I check 
this in you can do:

	NSObject.pyobjc_classMethods.description()	# Call +description
	a = NSObject.new()
	a.pyobjc_classMethods.description()  # Also call +description
	a.pyobjc_instanceMethods.description() # Call -description

I've not yet added an pyobjc_instanceMethods attribute to 
class-proxies. Another restriction is that reflection doesn't work yet 
for the contents of these attributes, dir(NSObject.pyobjc_classMethods) 
will not return a list of class methods.

I'm not yet completely happy with this solution because you cannot 
override these hidden methods in subclasses, that is you cannot define 
a class-method 'description' in your subclass of NSObject(*). But 
because this should rarely be necessary I can live with this.

Ronald

(*) Hmm, now that I think of it, you should be able to override the 
class-method description, you just cannot name your version 
'description': The objc.selector function has an optional argument for 
specifying the selector.

I've not yet tested if this actually works and now that I think of it, 
the testsuite doesn't seem to contain a test for overriding a 
class-method at all.