PEP? context overloading: if wants(type): ...
Jim Dennis
jimd at vega.starshine.org
Mon Aug 6 03:23:12 EDT 2001
I'm not qualified to formally champion a PEP, but I'd
like to raise the question here to see if it's of interest.
One feature that I find interesting about PERL is it's
"context sensitivity." (By contrast the inability to overload
a function on *return* type is a limitation of C++ that I find
irritating and unnecessary).
I'd propose, if I felt qualified to do so, to offer a "wants()"
or builtin that would allow a method to determine the desired
return type or "context" of an invocation.
So the use could look like:
import types
if wants(IntType):
return n
elif wants(TupleType):
return (n1,n2)
elif wants(StringType):
return `n`
elif wants(VoidType): # NoneType?
return
What am I missing about this? What would it hurt?
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