[Python-Dev] Monkeypatching idioms -- elegant or ugly? (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Jan 15 17:22:25 CET 2008

Guido van Rossum <guido python.org> writes:

I ran into the need of monkeypatching a large number of classes (for what I think are very good reasons and invented two new recipes. These don't depend on Py3k, and the second one actually works all the way back to Python 2.2. Neither of these allows monkeypatching built-in types like list. If you don't know what monkeypatching is, see see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeypatch. I think it's useful to share these recipes, if only to to establish whether they have been discovered before, or to decide whether they are worthy of a place in the standard library. I didn't find any relevant hits on the ASPN Python cookbook.

pypy has something that requires the base class to use a specific metaclass: https://codespeak.net/viewvc/pypy/dist/pypy/tool/pairtype.py?view=markup

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list