self-aware list of objects able to sense constituent member alterations?

[John O'Hagan]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Reckoner wrote:
> I'm not sure this is possible, but I would like to have
> a list of  objects
>
> A=[a,b,c,d,...,z]
>
> where,  in the midst of a lot of processing I might do something like,
>
> A[0].do_something_which_changes_the_properties()
>
> which alter the properties of the object 'a'.
>
> The trick is that I would like A to be mysteriously aware that
> something about the  object 'a' has changed so that when I revisit A,
> I will know that the other items in the list need to be refreshed to
> reflect the changes in A as a result of changing 'a'.
>
> Even better would be to automatically percolate the subsequent changes
> that resulted from altering 'a' for the rest of the items in the list.
[...]

Interesting question.

Maybe this is too simple for your purpose (or maybe just wrong!), but could 
you subclass list and give it an "update" method which keeps a dictionary of 
the state of its members and/or calls another method that makes the 
appropriate changes in the other members when a change occurs, something 
like:

class SelfAwareList(list):
    
    state_dict = {}
    
    def update(self):
        for i in self:
            if i.state == 'some_condition':
                self.do_stuff_to_other_members()
       	    self.state_dict[i] = i.state
        
    def do_stuff_to_other_members(self):
        print 'doing stuff...'

?

You could manually call update() on the SelfAwareList instance after calling a 
method on a SelfAwareList member, or even build it into the members' methods 
so that it was automatic.

HTH,

John