Book Image

Metaprogramming with Python

By : Sulekha AloorRavi
Book Image

Metaprogramming with Python

By: Sulekha AloorRavi

Overview of this book

Effective and reusable code makes your application development process seamless and easily maintainable. With Python, you will have access to advanced metaprogramming features that you can use to build high-performing applications. The book starts by introducing you to the need and applications of metaprogramming, before navigating the fundamentals of object-oriented programming. Next, you will learn about simple decorators, work with metaclasses, and later focus on introspection and reflection. You’ll also delve into generics and typing before defining templates for algorithms. As you progress, you will understand your code using abstract syntax trees and explore method resolution order. This Python book also shows you how to create your own dynamic objects before structuring the objects through design patterns. Finally, you will learn simple code-generation techniques along with discovering best practices and eventually building your own applications. By the end of this learning journey, you’ll have acquired the skills and confidence you need to design and build reusable high-performing applications that can solve real-world problems.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Fundamentals – Introduction to Object-Oriented Python and Metaprogramming
4
Part 2: Deep Dive – Building Blocks of Metaprogramming I
11
Part 3: Deep Dive – Building Blocks of Metaprogramming II

Generating multiple classes from a list

In this section, we will look at generating code for multiple classes dynamically using the ast module and its unparse method.

Generating the code for more than one class dynamically gives us a direction for implementing code generation for multiple functionalities of an application. The classes need not be for the same functionality and the class code thus generated can later be modified to include additional methods or attributes as required by the application. The skeletal class code will be generated through this example.

To understand this further, we will follow the sequence described in the following flow diagram.

Figure 14.3 – A code generation sequence for multiple classes

Let us now look at how to implement this scenario:

  1. We will first define a variable that can be assigned a list of class names as values:
    classnames = ["VegCounter", "ElectronicsCounter", "PasadenaBranch...