accessing a classes code

[Paul McGuire]

"Ryan Krauss" <ryanlists at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.4754.1145458893.27775.python-list at python.org...
======================
I have a set of Python classes that represent elements in a structural
model for vibration modeling (sort of like FEA).  Some of the
parameters of the model are initially unknown and I do some system
identification to determine the parameters.  After I determine these
unknown parameters, I would like to substitute them back into the
model and save the model as a new python class.  To do this, I think
each element needs to be able to read in the code for its __init__
method, make the substitutions and then write the new __init__ method
to a file defining a new class with the now known parameters.

Is there a way for a Python instance to access its own code
(especially the __init__ method)?  And if there is, is there a clean
way to write the modified code back to a file?   I assume that if I
can get the code as a list of strings, I can output it to a file
easily enough.
======================

Any chance you could come up with a less hacky design, such as creating a
sub-class of one of your base classes?  As in:

class BaseClass(object):
    def __init__(self):
        # do common base class stuff here
        print "doing common base functionality"

class SpecialCoolClass(BaseClass):
    def __init__(self,specialArg1, coolArg2):
        # invoke common initialization stuff
        # (much simpler than extracting lines of source code and
        # mucking with them)
        super(SpecialCoolClass,self).__init__()

        # now do special/cool stuff with additional init args
        print "but this is really special/cool!"
        print specialArg1
        print coolArg2

bc = BaseClass()
scc = SpecialCoolClass("Grabthar's Hammer", 6.02e23)

Prints:
----------
doing common base functionality
doing common base functionality
but this is really special/cool!
Grabthar's Hammer
6.02e+023

If you're still stuck on generating code, at least now you can just focus
your attention on how to generate your special-cool classes, and not so much
on extracting source code from running classes.

-- Paul