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

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Tue Jan 15 23:08:37 CET 2008

At 01:51 PM 1/15/2008 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On Jan 15, 2008 1:27 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote: > > Second, a "metaclass" to add a number of methods (or other attributes) > > to an existing class, using a convenient class notation: > > I think this is similar to my "partial" classes: > > http://pypi.python.org/pypi/partial

Indeed it is. I guess my only innovation is realizing that you don't have to create a real metaclass -- you can set metaclass to a function that does the magic. I like your feature of refusing overrides unless flagged with @replace. I think that despite the objection that monkeypatching shoudn't be made too easy, it's worth at looking into a unification of the API, features, and implementation.

I'm curious: has this affected your thoughts re: overloading existing functions? Note that overloading-in-place would provide the next_method idiom for calling the original function.

(I'm assuming you still don't like the idea of changing a function's code to do it, just wondering about the non-implementation aspect. :) )

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