finding name of instances created

[Scott David Daniels]

André Roberge wrote:
> Craig Ringer wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 16:13 -0800, André wrote:
>>
>>> Short version of what I am looking for:
>>>
>>> Given a class "public_class" which is instantiated a few times e.g.
>>>
>>> a = public_class()
>>> b = public_class()
>>> c = public_class()
>>>
>>> I would like to find out the name of the instances so that I could
>>> create a list of them e.g.
>>> ['a', 'b', 'c']
> 
> ...
> Behind the scene, I have something like:
> robot_dict = { 'robot' = CreateRobot( ..., name = 'robot') }
> and have mapped move() to correspond to robot_dict['robot'].move()
> (which does lots of stuff behind the scene.)
> ...[good explanation]...
 > Does this clarify what I am trying to do and why?

Yup.  Would something like this help?

     parts = globals().copy()
     parts.update(locals())
     names = [name for name, value in parts.iteritems()
              if isinstance(value, Robot)] # actual class name here

Note, however, that

     a = b = CreateRobot()

will give two different names to the same robot.

And even:

     Karl = CreateRobot()
     Freidrich = CreateRobot()
     for robot in (Karl, Freidrich):
         robot.move()

Will have two names for "Freidrich" -- Freidrich and robot


--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org