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

Chapter 5: Understanding Introspection

In this chapter, we will look at introspection in Python 3 and understand how it is useful in metaprogramming. Introspection is a concept where we can learn about the properties or attributes of objects in Python during runtime using a suite of Python’s built-in methods.

Why introspection? Introspection is an information-gathering process for Python objects, and the information thus gathered can help in utilizing the objects to perform generic operations by manipulating them externally and, in turn, can help us in writing metaprograms.

Before we understand how to implement introspection, we will have a look at the built-in functions of Python that help in performing introspection. Throughout this chapter, we will look at each function that helps us introspect and understand the objects we use in our programs.

In this chapter, we will be taking a look at the following main topics:

  • Introducing built-in functions
  • Using...