[PEAK] 'Categories' in Python

[Bob Ippolito]

On Dec 10, 2004, at 6:48 PM, Andy Gross wrote:

> On Dec 10, 2004, at 6:35 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>> There's nothing about categories that prevent them from manipulating 
>> data members of the class!  Why does it require the consent of the 
>> class?  When you define a category, you are literally extending the 
>> class in such a way that it indistinguishable from if you had defined 
>> it on the class in the first place.
>
> I guess I'm thinking of it as an analog of interfaces, except for 
> providing an implementation of an informal protocol, instead of just 
> the protocol specification.  Explicitly declaring consent is just a 
> way of formalizing things and perhaps providing a hook for 
> safety-checking.

Safety checking, hah :)

>> This implementation allows you to extend any class that has a 
>> writable dict, which is essentially "all" of them.  You can't extend 
>> built-in types like str or object, though, unlike other languages 
>> with this kind of facility.. but that is just not something you can 
>> do with the Python runtime without hacking C structs (we did this in 
>> Stackless, though, so it is possible but not recommended).
>> What else would you want?  Why does the class have to know or care?  
>> I think this is one of those "consenting adults" things :)
>
> For the same reason that classes declare what interfaces they provide, 
> I guess.  The specific application I'm thinking of would have 
> end-users defining category methods, so I prefer to be explicit about 
> the 'channels' (still can't think of a name) classes can be configured 
> on.

If you really wanted that, you could use this same implementation, but 
just have them write categories on empty abstract base classes instead 
of the class itself.  Just don't tell them they're allowed to write a 
category on the actual class (if they're even aware of the existence of 
the actual class).

You could even change the implementation of the Category function such 
that it checks to make sure that the user is providing one of these 
"allowed" abstract base classes... if you hated your users that much ;)

-bob