On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 9:29 PM, Guido van Rossum guido@python.org wrote:
I expect you can make something that behaves like list by defining __mul__ and __rmul__ and returning NotImplemented.
Hmm, it's fairly tricky, and part of the trick is that you can never return NotImplemented (because you have to pretty much take over and entirely replace the normal dispatch rules inside __mul__ and __rmul__), but see attached for something I think should work.
So I guess this is just how Python's list, tuple, etc. work, and PyPy and friends need to match...
-n
On Thursday, May 14, 2015, Stefan Richthofer Stefan.Richthofer@gmx.de wrote:
Should I be worried?
You mean should *I* be worried ;)
Stuff like this is highly relevant for JyNI, so thanks very much for clarifying this subtle behavior. It went onto my todo-list right now to ensure that JyNI will emulate this behavior as soon as I am done with gc-support. (Hopefully it will be feasible, but I can only tell in half a year or so since there are currently other priorities.) Still, this "essay" potentially will save me a lot of time.
So, everybody please feel encouraged to post things like this as they come up. Maybe there could be kind of a pitfalls-page somewhere in the docs collecting these things.
Best
Stefan
Gesendet: Freitag, 15. Mai 2015 um 02:45 Uhr Von: "Nathaniel Smith" njs@pobox.com An: "Python Dev" python-dev@python.org Betreff: [Python-Dev] Python-versus-CPython question for __mul__ dispatch
Hi all,
While attempting to clean up some of the more squamous aspects of numpy's operator dispatch code [1][2], I've encountered a situation where the semantics we want and are using are possible according to CPython-the-interpreter, but AFAICT ought not to be possible according to Python-the-language, i.e., it's not clear to me whether it's possible even in principle to implement an object that works the way numpy.ndarray does in any other interpreter. Which makes me a bit nervous, so I wanted to check if there was any ruling on this.
Specifically, the quirk we are relying on is this: in CPython, if you do
[1, 2] * my_object
then my_object's __rmul__ gets called *before* list.__mul__, *regardless* of the inheritance relationship between list and type(my_object). This occurs as a side-effect of the weirdness involved in having both tp_as_number->nb_multiply and tp_as_sequence->sq_repeat in the C API -- when evaluating "a * b", CPython tries a's nb_multiply, then b's nb_multiply, then a's sq_repeat, then b's sq_repeat. Since list has an sq_repeat but not an nb_multiply, this means that my_object's nb_multiply gets called before any list method.
Here's an example demonstrating how weird this is. list.__mul__ wants an integer, and by "integer" it means "any object with an __index__ method". So here's a class that list is happy to be multiplied by -- according to the ordinary rules for operator dispatch, in the example below Indexable.__mul__ and __rmul__ shouldn't even get a look-in:
In [3]: class Indexable(object): ...: def __index__(self): ...: return 2 ...:
In [4]: [1, 2] * Indexable() Out[4]: [1, 2, 1, 2]
But, if I add an __rmul__ method, then this actually wins:
In [6]: class IndexableWithMul(object): ...: def __index__(self): ...: return 2 ...: def __mul__(self, other): ...: return "indexable forward mul" ...: def __rmul__(self, other): ...: return "indexable reverse mul"
In [7]: [1, 2] * IndexableWithMul() Out[7]: 'indexable reverse mul'
In [8]: IndexableWithMul() * [1, 2] Out[8]: 'indexable forward mul'
NumPy arrays, of course, correctly define both __index__ method (which raises an array on general arrays but coerces to int for arrays that contain exactly 1 integer), and also defines an nb_multiply slot which accepts lists and performs elementwise multiplication:
In [9]: [1, 2] * np.array(2) Out[9]: array([2, 4])
And that's all great! Just what we want. But the only reason this is possible, AFAICT, is that CPython 'list' is a weird type with undocumented behaviour that you can't actually define using pure Python code.
Should I be worried?
-n
[1] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/5864 [2] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/5844
-- Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/stefan.richthofer%40gmx.d...
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