[Python-3000] PEP 3124 - Overloading, Generic Functions, Interfaces, etc. (original) (raw)

Jason Orendorff jason.orendorff at gmail.com
Wed May 2 04:43:22 CEST 2007

On 5/1/07, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

At 02:22 PM 5/1/2007 -0400, Jason Orendorff wrote: >I think I would prefer to always pass the next method >to @around methods, which always need it, and never >pass it to any of the others. What use case am I missing?

Calling the next method in a generic function is equivalent to calling super() in a normal method. Anytime you want to add more specific behavior for a type, while reusing the more general behavior, you're going to need it. [...]

Oh, I see. I thought @before, @after, and @around should cover all the use cases. But timing is not the only difference between them. It also affects how you affect other people's advice and how later, more specific advice will affect you. In short, you have to ask yourself: am I hooking something (before/after), implementing it (when), or just generally looking for trouble (around)?

I haven't used CLOS or Aspect-J, but I have played Magic: the Gathering, which judging by these examples is largely the same thing. Incidentally, Magic gets by with just @around (which they spell "instead of") and @after (which they spell "when").

Come to think of it, Inform 7 is the other system I know of that has an advice system like this. Now I'm suspicious. Are you trying to turn Python into some kind of game?

I forgot to say earlier: Thanks very much for writing this PEP. This should be interesting.

The other possibility would be to clone the functions using copied funcglobals (globals?) so that 'nextmethod' in those namespaces would point to the right next method. But then, if the function writes any globals, it'll be updating the wrong namespace. Do you have any other ideas?

Here's what I've got left. Take your pick:

@when(bisect.bisect, withNextMethod=True) def bisect_bee(nextMethod, seq : Sequence, eric : Bee, *options): ...

..in which case @override would be left out in the cold, but I'm okay with that. Or else:

@override @withNextMethod def bisect(nextMethod, ...): ...

Your idea of using the argument annotation was fine, too. Any of these three is better than detecting the argument name.

-j

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