Book Image

Expert Python Programming – Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By : Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé
5 (1)
Book Image

Expert Python Programming – Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

5 (1)
By: Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé

Overview of this book

This new edition of Expert Python Programming provides you with a thorough understanding of the process of building and maintaining Python apps. Complete with best practices, useful tools, and standards implemented by professional Python developers, this fourth edition has been extensively updated. Throughout this book, you’ll get acquainted with the latest Python improvements, syntax elements, and interesting tools to boost your development efficiency. The initial few chapters will allow experienced programmers coming from different languages to transition to the Python ecosystem. You will explore common software design patterns and various programming methodologies, such as event-driven programming, concurrency, and metaprogramming. You will also go through complex code examples and try to solve meaningful problems by bridging Python with C and C++, writing extensions that benefit from the strengths of multiple languages. Finally, you will understand the complete lifetime of any application after it goes live, including packaging and testing automation. By the end of this book, you will have gained actionable Python programming insights that will help you effectively solve challenging problems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

Code generation

As we already mentioned, dynamic code generation is the most difficult approach to metaprogramming. There are tools in Python that allow you to generate and execute code or even make some modifications to already compiled code objects.

Various projects such as Hy (mentioned later) show that even whole languages can be reimplemented in Python using code generation techniques. This proves that the possibilities are practically limitless. Knowing how vast this topic is and how badly it is riddled with various pitfalls, I won't even try to give detailed suggestions on how to create code this way, or to provide useful code samples.

Anyway, knowing what is possible may be useful for you if you plan to study this field in more depth by yourself. So, treat this section only as a short summary of possible starting points for further learning.

Let's take a look at how to use the exec(), eval(), and compile() functions.

exec, eval, and compile

...