Making helper methods more concise

[Terry Reedy]

On 4/16/2012 8:01 AM, Alan Ristow wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have defined a class that includes a number of helper methods that
> are useful to me, but pretty redundant. Something like so, where I
> maintain a list of tuples:
>
> class A(object):
>      def __init__(self):
>          self.listing = []
>
>      # This method does the work.
>      def append_text(self, text, style):
>          self.listing.append((text, style))

The order of parameters and tuples seems backwards to me. Suppose you 
want to sort the list by style ;-). But maybe you never will. 'append' 
as the method name would seem sufficient to me.

>      # The rest of the methods are just helpers.
>      def append_paragraph(self, text):
>          self.append_text(text, 'Paragraph')
>
>      def append_header(self, text):
>          self.append_text(text, 'Header')
>
>      def append_title(self, text):
>          self.append_title(text, 'Title')
>
> obj = A()
> obj.append_title('On Learning Something New About Python')
> obj.append_header('A Question Is Posed')
> obj.append_paragraph('Where is lorem ipsum when you need it?')

I would try a different approach:

T = 'Title'
H = 'Header'
P = 'Paragragh'

Then dump all the reverse-curried helpers.

obj.append(T, 'On Learning Something New About Python')
obj.append(H, 'A Question Is Posed')
obj.append(P, 'Where is lorem ipsum when you need it?')

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy