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Message: [QUOTE="Daniel 'Dang' Griffith, post: 1759211"] Yes, you're right. I mis-spoke what I meant. Maybe this is closer, "You can't add or remove arbitrary attributes to an instance of a class... without magic." What I mean is that with a dictionary, the keys can come from external/arbitrary data and be added to the dictionary with a simple assignment: d = dict() k, v = raw_input(), raw_input() d[k] = v w = d[k] You can't do that to classes or instances without some kind of magic. class Foo: pass foo = Foo() k, v = raw_input(), raw_input() setattr(foo, k, v) w = getattr(foo, k) Maybe its just me, but I consider getattr/setattr magic (although in this simple example, they don't appear too magical, so maybe others wouldn't consider it so). Still, I think it is an overgeneralization to say that classes are just syntactic sugar for dictionaries. --dang [/QUOTE]