[EVALUATION] - E01: The Java Failure - May Python Helps?

[Terry Reedy]

"Ilias Lazaridis" <ilias at lazaridis.com> wrote in message 
news:cu2m3q$km1$1 at usenet.otenet.gr...

If you ask too much that other people do your searching for you, answers 
will dry up.  But here are a couple that you might not find on google 
anyway, at least not easily.

> I want to add metadata to everything within my design (functions, data,
> classes, ...), if possible with a standard way.

You can annotate, by adding attributes to, modules, functions, classes, and 
class instances.  You can not directly do so with 'basic' types: numbers, 
sequences, and dicts -- and some others.  You can, however, either extend 
or wrap anything with your own classes to get something you can annotate 
(but don't ask me for the details).

> I want to generate things (code, txt, html etc.) out of my object-model,
>  whilst using with a flexible generator, if possible a standard one.

One standard way to generate text from objects is to use custom classes, 
each with a custom __str__ method.  Assuming you have a hierachical model 
without loops, each such method can recursively call each data attribute 
object of the instancefor it to generate its substring.  (With loops you 
need a loop-cutting mechanism to prevent infinite recursion.)  I know this 
has been done for html (but again, I won't google for you).  Define a class 
for each type of element and give each instance a list of element instances 
it contains.  Then 'print html_doc_instance' can print the html doc 
corresponding to the object model.

Like others, I recommend you spend a day with Python if you wish to learn 
more.

Terry J. Reedy