Python Type Gripe

I've been digging into Python lately. On Friday, I ran into an unintuitive behavior where two sets containing identical objects (of a custom class) were comparing unequal. I bet you can guess the reason: I hadn't defined __hash__ and __eq__ for my class. Take a look at this documentation for __repr__:

For many types, this function makes an attempt to return a string that would yield an object with the same value when passed to eval(), otherwise the representation is a string enclosed in angle brackets that contains the name of the type of the object together with additional information often including the name and address of the object. A class can control what this function returns for its instances by defining a __repr__() method.

"For many?" "makes an attempt?!" "often including?!!" To my way of thinking, this is a little crazy. There should be a single root class in the inheritance hierarchy, and that root should define __repr__, __hash__, and __eq__ methods that operate on/check for equality of each attribute in the class (by value, not by memory address!) Then they would behave consistently for all classes. Then two sets, each containing three objects of the same class, each containing the same attributes with the same values, would compare equal when you used == on them, following the principle of least surprise.

Of course, I can't rewrite Python to make this happen. I'm tempted just to make my own root class that implements these behaviors via metaprogramming, and make every class I ever define a subclass of it. Is there a better way?

PS: A colleague pointed out that this behavior reflects a deliberate decision in Python design philosophy: "Python […] favors informal protocols over inheritance trees […] You can think of __eq__ and __hash__ as kind of being parts of an informal 'collectable' protocol." That sort of makes sense. Of course, the thing about informal protocols is that there's nothing to enforce consistency.