Bulk Adding Methods Pythonically

[Rob Gaddi]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Thu, 16 Jun 2016 04:39 am, Rob Gaddi wrote:
>
>>> class Channel:
>>> frequency = mkmeasure('frequency', 'FREQ')
>>> falltime = mkmeasure('falltime', 'FTIM')
>> 
>> Thought about it, but whenever I'm dropping 20-someodd of those there's
>> inevitably some place where I screw up the replication of the quoted
>> name and the bound name.
>
> So? You have unit tests, right? Add one more test that checks the names. You
> can even add that to your class definition code:
>
> NAMES = ('frequency', 'falltime')
> THINGIES = ('FREQ', 'FTIM')
>
> class Channel:
>     for name, thingy in zip(NAMES, THINGIES):
>         locals()[name] = mkmeasure(name, thingy)
>
> assert all(getattr(Channel, name).__name__ == name for name in NAMES)
>
>
> But at the point that you have 20+ almost identical methods, you should take
> that as a cold-smell. Why do you have so many almost identical methods?
>
> (That doesn't mean it is *necessarily* wrong, only that you have to think
> carefully about whether it is or not.)
>

The context is that I've got an oscilloscope here on my desk with a USB
cable around to my PC.  There are a slew of different measurements that
I can request it make of the waveform on a given channel (i.e. the cable
connected to the front-panel connector marked "2").  I send it ASCII
commands like ':MEAS:VAMP? CHAN1' and it sends me ASCII replies like
'1.033e-01'.  I'm trying to wrap an API around all this that allows me
to treat channels as Channels and ask questions like:
  0.1 < chan.amplitude() < 0.2

I could just implement all that as a lookup in __getattr__, I suppose. 
The efficiency hit would be invisible next to the time spent doing all
that I/O.  But it feels hacky compared to having inspectable methods
with docstrings, like the sort of thing that future me will want to take
past me behind the woodshed for.

-- 
Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
Email address domain is currently out of order.  See above to fix.