Newbie: anything resembling static?

[Nick Vargish]

phil at dspfactory.com (Phil Rittenhouse) writes:

> I'm thinking about something like a function to send a byte out
> a serial port.  The first time it's called it needs to initialize
> the UART, but after that it doesn't.  

This problem is exactly where classes will help:


class SerialPort:
    __shared_state = {}
    def __init__(self, address):
        self.__dict__ = self.__shared_state
        self.initialized = False
        # other stuff to set up the serial port
    def send_byte(self, x):
        if not self.initialided:
            self.initialize()
        self.xmit(x)  
    def initialize(self):
        # initialize the UART
        self.initialized = True

> If you used this function the way you might use print() for debugging 
> purposes, it might be called in hundreds of places in a large project.
> If you wrapped it in a class, you'd have to take care of creating the object
> before anyone calls it and sharing that object around somehow so everyone 
> can access it. 

That's what the __shared_state bit is all about. It's a "Borg" object;
each time you instantiate a SerialPort object, it will be the same
critter:

(http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/66531)

Nick

--
# sigmask.py  ||  version 0.2  ||  2003-01-07  ||  Feed this to your Python.
print reduce(lambda x,y:x+chr(ord(y)-1),'Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAqbusjpu/ofu?','')