Replace Whole Object Through Object Method

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

digitalorganics at gmail.com a écrit :
> Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
(snip)
>>
>>Instead of exposing problems with your solution, you may want to expose
>>the real use case ?
> 
> 
> I'm working with a team that's doing social modeling, and for example,
> I need to model workers that at some point in the program may or may
> not also become employers. 

If I understand correctly, only some of the existing workers will become 
employers ?

> Now, I want the workers to take on all
> behaviors and attributes of an employer in addition to their
> pre-existing "worker" behaviors and attributes.

wrt/ behaviors, it's easy as pie. Attributes (I mean instance 
attributes) are another problem, but I don't have enough informations to 
deal with this problem here.

> Also, as I'm sure you
> guessed, the workers' attributes need to retain their values at that
> point in the program, so a brand new worker-employer object wouldn't in
> itself do the trick.

Here's a simple stupid possible solution:

class Worker(object):
   def __init__(self, ...)
     # init code here

   # behaviours here

   def becomeEmployer(self):
     self.___class__ = Employer

class Employer(Worker):
   # behaviours here


w = Worker(...)
w.becomeEmployer()

Note that there's no initializer in the Employer class - it wouldn't get 
called anyway (not automatically at least).