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

What happens when data types are specified?

Annotations in Python are added to code to provide additional information or help to end users with a piece of code while creating libraries. Annotations can be used to add data types to a specific code so that the information on data types can later be retrieved using the annotations by developers.

Type hints as annotations

In the context of typing, which is the topic of this chapter, let’s look at type hints in this section. Data types of a function or method can be defined in Python using a functionality of annotations called type hinting. Type hinting is a concept laid out in PEP 483 (Python Enhancement Proposals) for Python 3.5 by Guido van Rossum and Ivan Levkivskyi. Type hinting can be read in detail in the Python documentation available at PEP 483 – The Theory of Type Hints at peps.python.org. Type hinting is used to provide information to the developers on the data types and return types of Python objects and...