What is introspection/reflection and does Python support it?

Introspection is the ability to examine an object at runtime. Python has a dir() function that supports examining the attributes of an object, type() to check the object type, isinstance(), etc.

While introspection is passive examination of the objects, reflection is a more powerful tool where we could modify objects at runtime and access them dynamically. E.g.

• setattr() adds or modifies an object’s attribute;
• getattr() gets the value of an attribute of an object.

It can even invoke functions dynamically:

getattr(my_obj, "my_func_name")()