An even lower level attribute processing is the __getattribute__() method. The default implementation attempts to locate the value as an existing attribute in the internal __dict__ (or __slots__). If the attribute is not found, it calls __getattr__() as a fallback. If the value located is a descriptor (see in the following Creating descriptors section), then it processes the descriptor. Otherwise, the value is simply returned.
By overriding this method, we can perform any of the following kinds of tasks:
We can effectively prevent access to attributes. This method, by raising an exception instead of returning a value, can make an attribute more secret than if we were to merely use the leading underscore (
_) to mark a name as private to the implementation.We can invent new attributes similarly to how
__getattr__()can invent new attributes. In this case, however, we can bypass the default lookup done by the default version of__getattribute__().We can make attributes...