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 7: Understanding Generics and Typing

In this chapter, we will look at what generics are and how to perform type checking in Python 3 and understand how it is useful in metaprogramming.

Python is a programming language where variables are declared as generics and they don’t get a data type assigned to them on the declaration. Python resolves the data types dynamically during runtime depending on the values assigned to variables. In other programming languages such as C++, generics need to be programmatically designed to make the variables generic, whereas in Python, generics are how the variables are defined. In such cases, how we would declare a variable with typing and restrict the behavior of the variables is what we will be focusing on in detail in this chapter.

Throughout this chapter, we will look at understanding how generics work in Python and how to define type checks so that we can apply metaprogramming on variables to statically type them so that we...