Current patch has a little more code cleanup and a bunch more tests. I copied and adapted test_property to test_VirtualAttribute, and VirtualAttribute passes every test except the __slots__ test where __doc__ is not supposed to copy. I think the problem there is that VA is a python object and already has a __doc__ so having __slots__ not show __doc__ doesn't help. I put a skipIf(hasattr, obj, '__doc__') around that test. I'm still not crazy about the name VirtualAttribute... oh well. If no negative feedback by mid-week I'll commit, as I would really like this code to be the next alpha.