Are object literals Pythonic?

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JavaScript has object literals, e.g.

var p = {
  name: "John Smith",
  age:  23
}

and .NET has anonymous types, e.g.

var p = new { Name = "John Smith", Age = 23}; // C#

Something similar can be emulated in Python by (ab)using named arguments:

class literal(object):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        for (k,v) in kwargs.iteritems():
            self.__setattr__(k, v)
    def __repr__(self):
        return 'literal(%s)' % ', '.join('%s = %r' % i for i in sorted(self.__dict__.iteritems()))
    def __str__(self):
        return repr(self)

Usage:

p = literal(name = "John Smith", age = 23)
print p       # prints: literal(age = 23, name = 'John Smith')
print p.name  # prints: John Smith

But is this kind of code considered to be Pythonic?

object-literal python
8 Answers

I'd say that the solution you implemented looks pretty Pythonic; that being said, types.SimpleNamespace (documented here) already wraps this functionality:

from types import SimpleNamespace
p = SimpleNamespace(name = "John Smith", age = 23)
print(p)
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