Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Overview of this book

This book covers the unexplored secrets of Python, delve into its depths, and uncover its mysteries. You’ll unearth secrets related to the implementation of the standard library, by looking at how modules actually work. You’ll understand the implementation of collections, decimals, and fraction modules. If you haven’t used decorators, coroutines, and generator functions much before, as you make your way through the recipes, you’ll learn what you’ve been missing out on. We’ll cover internal special methods in detail, so you understand what they are and how they can be used to improve the engineering decisions you make. Next, you’ll explore the CPython interpreter, which is a treasure trove of secret hacks that not many programmers are aware of. We’ll take you through the depths of the PyPy project, where you’ll come across several exciting ways that you can improve speed and concurrency. Finally, we’ll take time to explore the PEPs of the latest versions to discover some interesting hacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Implementing namedtuple


Using namedtuple, a developer can give meaning to each item in a tuple and allow the tuple's fields to be accessed by name rather than by index value. This allows for more readable and better self-documenting code. Named tuples can be used in place of regular tuples with no adverse effects.

Named tuples can be thought of as using dictionary-type key:value pairs, except in a tuple. It's not a true mapping of key to value, because named tuples are simply assigning a name to a sequence index position, that is, name=value, but it may help to conceptually think of them as unchanging mapped pairs. Named positions can be called by name or by position index.

namedtuple is generated using the following command format:

collections.namedtuple(typename, field_names, *, verbose=False, rename=False, module=None)

The following is an explanation of the parts of the preceding command:

  • typename: The name of the tuple subclass being created. Subclass instances automatically generate docstrings...