I learned some neat stuff at clepy last night

Posted on by

Brian Beck showed how to use metaclasses and descriptors to make DSLs with python.

I do this kind of this kind of thing every so often in my code:

def f(x):
class C(object):
y = x
return C

That function takes a parameter and makes and returns a class based on that parameter. Whoop-di-do. I was surprised to learn that you can’t do this:

class C(object):
x = 99
class D(object):
y = x + 1

I gotta explore this some more until it makes sense.

Here’s another neat trick: It isn’t possible to add two classes together:

>>> class C(object):
... pass
...
>>> C + C
------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'type' and 'type'

But if you want to support this, the solution would be to define an __add__ method on the metaclass:

>>> type(C)

>>> class MC(type):
... def __add__(self, other):
... print 'Adding!'
... return 99
...
>>> class C(object):
... __metaclass__ = MC
...
>>> C + C
Adding!
99

Wacky, right? More realistically, I could build a new class by taking attributes of both classes together. In other words, if class C has a class attribute x, and class D has a class attribute y, then we can use a metaclass to add C and D together to get a new class E, that has both x and y as class attributes.

In this example, C has a class attribute x and D has a class attribute y. When I add the two classes, I get a new class with both of those class attributes.

>>> C.x, D.y
(99, 98)
>>> E = C + D
>>> E.x, E.y
(99, 98)

Here’s the metaclass that allows this sort of nonsense:

class MC(type):

def __add__(self, other):

class E(self):
pass

for k,v in other.__dict__.items():
if k not in ('__dict__', ):
setattr(E, k, v)

return E

3 thoughts on “I learned some neat stuff at clepy last night”

  2. Great post, what you said is really helpful to me. I can't agree with you anymore. I have been talking with my friend about, he though it is really interesting as well. Keep up with your good work, I would come back to you.

  3. Great post, what you said is really helpful to me. I can't agree with you anymore. I have been talking with my friend about, he though it is really interesting as well. Keep up with your good work, I would come back to you.

Comments are closed.