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 a class with methods

In this section, let us generate code for a class and its methods. Throughout this chapter, our goal is to generate code dynamically for building applications that can solve a specific purpose. Adding methods along with attributes makes the code generation for a class even more application-specific. We can look at two variations of this example:

  • Generating a class with an init method
  • Generating a class with a user-defined method

Let’s discuss each in detail.

Generating a class with an init method

In this example, let us generate code for a class and add an init method to the class and also initialize attributes. In this example, we will define a class for the vegetable counter of ABC Megamart. In the init method, let us initialize cart items from the vegetable counter of ABC Megamart in this class:

classname = "VegCounter"
classtemplate =  '''class ''' +classname...