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

Overview of metaclasses

Metaclasses are classes that can be created separately with certain features that can alter the behavior of other classes or can help in dynamically manufacturing new classes. The base class of all metaclasses is the type class and the object or instance of a metaclass will be a class. Any custom metaclass that we create will be inherited from the type class. type is the class of all data types in Python as well and everything else in Python 3 is an object of the type class. We can test this statement by checking the type of different program objects in Python, as follows:

class TestForType:  
    pass  
type(TestForType)
type
type(int)
type
type(str)
type
type(object)
type
type(float)
type
type(list)
type

In this chapter, we will look at some examples of how to use these metaclasses, how to implement them, and how to reuse them. We will continue with our ABC Megamart examples...