Rejection notice (with Barry's agreement).

pep-0231.txt

@@ -602,6 +602,26 @@ References
     [9] http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0213.html
 
 
+Rejection
+
+    There are serious problems with the recursion-protection feature.
+    As described here it's not thread-safe, and a thread-safe solution
+    has other problems.  In general, it's not clear how helpful the
+    recursion-protection feature is; it makes it hard to write code
+    that needs to be callable inside __findattr__ as well as outside
+    it.  But without the recursion-protection, it's hard to implement
+    __findattr__ at all (since __findattr__ would invoke itself
+    recursively for every attribute it tries to access).  There seems
+    to be no good solution here.
+
+    It's also dubious how useful it is to support __findattr__ both
+    for getting and for setting attributes -- __setattr__ gets called
+    in all cases alrady.
+
+    The examples can all be implemented using __getattr__ if care is
+    taken not to store instance variables under their own names.
+
+
 Copyright
 
     This document has been placed in the Public Domain.