On Jan 30, 2008 9:00 PM, Kevin Teague
+1 on having established Python idioms for these techniques.
While I don't know if there has ever been a formal definition of monkey patch, the term monkey patch came from guerilla patch, which came from two or more dynamic modifications to a class interfering with each other. These modifications were usually made by extension code (Zope add-on Products) to upstream code (the Zope framework), so I would define a monkey patch only as dynamic modifications made to a class with the *intent to change or correct behaviour in upstream code*.
The term has also caught on with the a second definition of referring to any dynamic modification of class, regardless of intent though.
Check out the wikipedia entry too.
I would perhaps call these methods something like:
* add_method_to_class
* extend_class
I don't like extend because in Java that's how you define a subclass.
This gives you a better idea of what they do, rather than use a term with a somewhat ambigous definition. With monkeypatch_method under the definition of "altering existing upstream behviour", I might expect it to raise an error if the method I was replacing on a class did not exist (e.g. upstream code was refactored so my patch no longer applied).
Funny, several examples mentioned earlier in this thread actually check that the method *doesn't* already exist... -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)