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 6: Implementing Reflection on Python Objects

In this chapter, we will look at reflection in Python 3 and understand how it is useful in metaprogramming. Reflection is a continuation of introspection, or it can be looked upon as a concept where we can make use of the information we learn from the introspection of properties or attributes of objects in Python and apply them to manipulate the objects, and so perform metaprogramming.

Why reflection? As we know from the previous chapter, introspection is an information-gathering process for Python objects. Reflection is the process of utilizing the information gathered from objects through introspection, and in turn, performing generic operations on them by manipulating them externally to perform metaprogramming.

Throughout this chapter, we will look at implementing reflection using each function that helped us introspect objects in the previous chapter and perform metaprogramming on the objects we use in our programs.

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