Two minor syntactic proposals

Barry A. Warsaw barry at digicool.com
Mon Jun 18 02:07:54 EDT 2001


    GM> Suppose you have a class and want to add a new method to
    GM> it. (Why? It's someone else's, you aren't allowed to change
    GM> the source, and subclassing won't do because these things are
    GM> created by code you don't control.)

    GM> You can do it, thus:

    |    def new_method(self, x):
    |        something_else()
    |        return x+1
    |    Thing.new_method = new_method

Long ago, I propsed being able to do something like

class Thing:
    pass

def Thing.new_method(self, x):
    something_else()
    return x+1

No new syntax is necessary, and it would allow more separation of
interface and implementation, allowing the /interface/ to be the class
definition, maybe even scarecrow-ish in nature, while the
implementation could be completely separated into a separate file, or
farther down in the same file.

It never caught on, but this was in the (way) pre-PEP days.  If
there's interest, I could write up a PEP on this.

-Barry




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