How to make an immutable object in Python?

Question

Yet another solution I just thought of: The simplest way to get the same behaviour as your original code is

Immutable = collections.namedtuple("Immutable", ["a", "b"])

It does not solve the problem that attributes can be accessed via [0] etc., but at least it's considerably shorter and provides the additional advantage of being compatible with pickle and copy.

namedtuple creates a type similar to what I described in this answer, i.e. derived from tuple and using __slots__. It is available in Python 2.6 or above.

The easiest way to do this is using __slots__:

class A(object):
    __slots__ = []

Instances of A are immutable now, since you can't set any attributes on them.

If you want the class instances to contain data, you can combine this with deriving from tuple:

from operator import itemgetter
class Point(tuple):
    __slots__ = []
    def __new__(cls, x, y):
        return tuple.__new__(cls, (x, y))
    x = property(itemgetter(0))
    y = property(itemgetter(1))

p = Point(2, 3)
p.x
# 2
p.y
# 3

Edit: If you want to get rid of indexing either, you can override __getitem__():

class Point(tuple):
    __slots__ = []
    def __new__(cls, x, y):
        return tuple.__new__(cls, (x, y))
    @property
    def x(self):
        return tuple.__getitem__(self, 0)
    @property
    def y(self):
        return tuple.__getitem__(self, 1)
    def __getitem__(self, item):
        raise TypeError

Note that you can't use operator.itemgetter for the properties in thise case, since this would rely on Point.__getitem__() instead of tuple.__getitem__(). Fuerthermore this won't prevent the use of tuple.__getitem__(p, 0), but I can hardly imagine how this should constitute a problem.

I don't think the "right" way of creating an immutable object is writing a C extension. Python usually relies on library implementers and library users being consenting adults, and instead of really enforcing an interface, the interface should be clearly stated in the documentation. This is why I don't consider the possibility of circumventing an overridden __setattr__() by calling object.__setattr__() a problem. If someone does this, it's on her own risk.

..howto do it "properly" in C..

You could use Cython to create an extension type for Python:

cdef class Immutable:
    cdef readonly object a, b
    cdef object __weakref__ # enable weak referencing support

    def __init__(self, a, b):
        self.a, self.b = a, b

It works both Python 2.x and 3.

Tests

# compile on-the-fly
import pyximport; pyximport.install() # $ pip install cython
from immutable import Immutable

o = Immutable(1, 2)
assert o.a == 1, str(o.a)
assert o.b == 2

try: o.a = 3
except AttributeError:
    pass
else:
    assert 0, 'attribute must be readonly'

try: o[1]
except TypeError:
    pass
else:
    assert 0, 'indexing must not be supported'

try: o.c = 1
except AttributeError:
    pass
else:
    assert 0, 'no new attributes are allowed'

o = Immutable('a', [])
assert o.a == 'a'
assert o.b == []

o.b.append(3) # attribute may contain mutable object
assert o.b == [3]

try: o.c
except AttributeError:
    pass
else:
    assert 0, 'no c attribute'

o = Immutable(b=3,a=1)
assert o.a == 1 and o.b == 3

try: del o.b
except AttributeError:
    pass
else:
    assert 0, "can't delete attribute"

d = dict(b=3, a=1)
o = Immutable(**d)
assert o.a == d['a'] and o.b == d['b']

o = Immutable(1,b=3)
assert o.a == 1 and o.b == 3

try: object.__setattr__(o, 'a', 1)
except AttributeError:
    pass
else:
    assert 0, 'attributes are readonly'

try: object.__setattr__(o, 'c', 1)
except AttributeError:
    pass
else:
    assert 0, 'no new attributes'

try: Immutable(1,c=3)
except TypeError:
    pass
else:
    assert 0, 'accept only a,b keywords'

for kwd in [dict(a=1), dict(b=2)]:
    try: Immutable(**kwd)
    except TypeError:
        pass
    else:
        assert 0, 'Immutable requires exactly 2 arguments'

If you don't mind indexing support then collections.namedtuple suggested by @Sven Marnach is preferrable:

Immutable = collections.namedtuple("Immutable", "a b")

Using a Frozen Dataclass

For Python 3.7+ you can use a Data Class with a frozen=True option, which is a very pythonic and maintainable way to do what you want.

It would look something like that:

from dataclasses import dataclass

@dataclass(frozen=True)
class Immutable:
    a: Any
    b: Any

As type hinting is required for dataclasses' fields, I have used Any from the typing module.

Reasons NOT to use a Namedtuple

Before Python 3.7 it was frequent to see namedtuples being used as immutable objects. It can be tricky in many ways, one of them is that the __eq__ method between namedtuples does not consider the objects' classes. For example:

from collections import namedtuple

ImmutableTuple = namedtuple("ImmutableTuple", ["a", "b"])
ImmutableTuple2 = namedtuple("ImmutableTuple2", ["a", "c"])

obj1 = ImmutableTuple(a=1, b=2)
obj2 = ImmutableTuple2(a=1, c=2)

obj1 == obj2  # will be True

As you see, even if the types of obj1 and obj2 are different, even if their fields' names are different, obj1 == obj2 still gives True. That's because the __eq__ method used is the tuple's one, which compares only the values of the fields given their positions. That can be a huge source of errors, specially if you are subclassing these classes.