python - Defining function without the brackets?

Question

I understand that my question might sound stupid, and that there might be something in the language definition that explicitly prohibits this notion, but since I don't know about this prohibition, I was wondering whether someone could shed some light on it. In short, I would like to define a python function that I could call from the python shell, but I would like to avoid the brackets. There are cases when a function does not require an argument, and then the bracket only seems to indicate that we are dealing with a function. Such an example would be, if one wants to print the current working directory. I can define a function as

def pwd():
    print os.getcwd()

and then I can call it from the shell as

pwd()

But what if I would like to have a function that I can call as

pwd

Is this possible at all?

Answer 1

You're going to get some syntax in there somewhere. You could try something like:

import os
class Shell(object):
    @property
    def pwd(self):
        print os.getcwd()

And then in your interpreter, run:

>>> s = Shell()
>>> s.pwd
/tmp