On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 2:17 PM, Antoine Pitrou <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:

> .. These flags are primarily useful for C extension developers, there's little point checking them from Python code.

Of course there is: it helps debugging problems in types implemented
in C.  For example, someone working on the numpy issue described in
msg110788, would probably appreciate having
inspect.TPFLAGS_INT_SUBCLASS and would probaly use it in his or hers
unit tests.

My point is: we have __flags__ attribute on type objects exposed in
python there should be a way to interpret what it means without
looking up object.h or C API documentation.

BTW, __flags__ itself could grow a docstring and deserves to be
mentioned in the docs.  Note that copyreg.py uses it to determine
wither a class is dynamically allocated.   Maybe this should also go
to inspect as inspect.isheaptype().