That is a reasonable assumption in the common case, but it's reasonable to not always assume that. The same is true if you have obj.v(), you would normally expe

That is a reasonable assumption in the common case, but it's reasonable to not always assume that. The same is true if you have obj.v(), you would normally expect there to be some v property defined on the object but really it might be coming dynamically from __getattr__(). This is something that python specifically has language level support for, I wouldn't say it's a hack just because its using a feature that isn't taught in Python 101.