Symbols as parameters?

[Martin Drautzburg]

On 22 Jan., 11:56, Roald de Vries <r... at roalddevries.nl> wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> On Jan 21, 2010, at 8:43 AM, Martin Drautzburg wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Hello all,
>
> > When passing parameters to a function, you sometimes need a paramter
> > which can only assume certain values, e.g.
>
> >        def move (direction):
> >                ...
> > If direction can only be "up", "down", "left" or "right", you can  
> > solve
> > this by passing strings, but this is not quite to the point:
>
> >        - you could pass invalid strings easily
> >        - you need to quote thigs, which is a nuisance
> >        - the parameter IS REALLY NOT A STRING, but a direction
>
> > Alternatively you could export such symbols, so when you "import *"  
> > you
> > have them available in the caller's namespace. But that forces you
> > to "import *" which pollutes your namespace.
>
> > What I am really looking for is a way
>
> >        - to be able to call move(up)
> >        - having the "up" symbol only in the context of the function  
> > call
>
> > So it should look something like this
>
> > ... magic, magic ...
> > move(up)
> > ... unmagic, unmagic ...
> > print up
>
> > This should complain that "up" is not defined during the "print" call,
> > but not when move() is called. And of course there should be as little
> > magic as possible.
>
> > Any way to achieve this?
>
> You could do something like this:
>
> class Move(object):
>      def __call__(self, direction):
>          print(direction)
>          return 0
>
>      def up(self):
>          return self('up')
>
> move = Move()
>
> Now move.up() means move('up'), and you can obviously do similar  
> things for other directions.- Zitierten Text ausblenden -
>
> - Zitierten Text anzeigen -

I had thought about that too. It gets a bit tricky when there is more
than one parameter and it completely fails whan a parameter can REALLY
be a number or an arbitrary string. Think: move(direction, distance)