Abstract attribute (not property)?

Question

What's the best practice to define an abstract instance attribute, but not as a property?

I would like to write something like:

class AbstractFoo(metaclass=ABCMeta):

    @property
    @abstractmethod
    def bar(self):
        pass

class Foo(AbstractFoo):

    def __init__(self):
        self.bar = 3

Instead of:

class Foo(AbstractFoo):

    def __init__(self):
        self._bar = 3

    @property
    def bar(self):
        return self._bar

    @bar.setter
    def setbar(self, bar):
        self._bar = bar

    @bar.deleter
    def delbar(self):
        del self._bar

Properties are handy, but for simple attribute requiring no computation they are an overkill. This is especially important for abstract classes which will be subclassed and implemented by the user (I don't want to force someone to use @property when he just could have written self.foo = foo in the __init__).

Abstract attributes in Python question proposes as only answer to use @property and @abstractmethod: it doesn't answer my question.

The ActiveState recipe for an abstract class attribute via AbstractAttribute may be the right way, but I am not sure. It also only works with class attributes and not instance attributes.

Answer 1

It's 2018, we deserve a bit better solution:

from better_abc import ABCMeta, abstract_attribute    # see below

class AbstractFoo(metaclass=ABCMeta):

    @abstract_attribute
    def bar(self):
        pass

class Foo(AbstractFoo):
    def __init__(self):
        self.bar = 3

class BadFoo(AbstractFoo):
    def __init__(self):
        pass

It will behave like this:

Foo()     # ok
BadFoo()  # will raise: NotImplementedError: Can't instantiate abstract class BadFoo
# with abstract attributes: bar

This answer uses same approach as the accepted answer, but integrates well with built-in ABC and does not require boilerplate of check_bar() helpers.

Here is the better_abc.py content:

from abc import ABCMeta as NativeABCMeta

class DummyAttribute:
    pass

def abstract_attribute(obj=None):
    if obj is None:
        obj = DummyAttribute()
    obj.__is_abstract_attribute__ = True
    return obj


class ABCMeta(NativeABCMeta):

    def __call__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
        instance = NativeABCMeta.__call__(cls, *args, **kwargs)
        abstract_attributes = {
            name
            for name in dir(instance)
            if getattr(getattr(instance, name), '__is_abstract_attribute__', False)
        }
        if abstract_attributes:
            raise NotImplementedError(
                "Can't instantiate abstract class {} with"
                " abstract attributes: {}".format(
                    cls.__name__,
                    ', '.join(abstract_attributes)
                )
            )
        return instance

The nice thing is that you can do:

class AbstractFoo(metaclass=ABCMeta):
    bar = abstract_attribute()

and it will work same as above.

Also one can use:

class ABC(ABCMeta):
    pass

to define custom ABC helper. PS. I consider this code to be CC0.

This could be improved by using AST parser to raise earlier (on class declaration) by scanning the __init__ code, but it seems to be an overkill for now (unless someone is willing to implement).