Message11966

@Patrick: If you search the code base for PyAttributeDeleted you'll find it used in a few other places, but always in connection with PySystemState.

(Eclipse does not do this search well with our code base so I usually have another editor open. JEdit has a very effective search-in-directory function (globbing, regex, ...) that I use all the time for browsing both our code and CPython's.)

I'm not totally sure what the idea is of PyAttributeDeleted: I think it is connected with the fact that PySystemState is not a proper module, and so the actual Java variable has to be set to "I'm not here". There are a lot of // xxx: comments nearby suggesting whoever added this was not totally happy with it, but they haven't left us much else to go on. Sometimes code archeology (Mercurial file history) will give you a clue to who added it and what they were trying to do. And then sometimes one thinks of a better answer.

But this is difficult. My "easy" tag was based on the expectation we could go with the flow: use PyAttributeDeleted instead of the "" and ensure dir() respects it, maybe universally, maybe just for PySystemState (in __rawdir__ I think). If something else breaks as a result, we can reconsider.