[jampekka]

Side effects on operator overload or attribute read are just really bad practice and is very rarely done. Do you second guess every identifier in C because it could be a preprocessor macro?

Yeah, stupid overloading like C++ IO is a mess, but I haven't encountered much such abuse in Python.

[cnity]

Fair points. I do find the scope of C macros to be far narrower than overloading, but you are right.