Extention to the integer class.

Quinn Dunkan quinn at triskaideka.ugcs.caltech.edu
Mon Mar 13 16:05:58 EST 2000


On Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:25:05 +0100 (CET), Gregoire Welraeds <greg at perceval.be>
wrote:
>In reply to the message of Anthony J Wilkinson sent on Mar 14 (see below) :
>
>> Alternatively you could use a __call__ method:
>>         def __call__(self):
>>             return self.__val
>
>This works great. It also avoid to implement __cmp__() since i can do:
>while i() < 2:
>	...
>
>Thanks too :)

Also note that you can use __coerce__:
class Int:
    def __init__(self, val):
        self.__val = val
    def __int__(self):
        return self.__val
    def inc(self):
        return Int(self + 1)
    def dec(self):
        return Int(self - 1)
    def __repr__(self):
        return repr(self.__val)
    def __coerce__(self, other):
        return (int(self), other)

Your original one mutated itself, but hopefully you didn't really mean that :)
And this one should probably have __add__ etc.

Of course, lists and tuples still won't attempt to coerce their index to an
int, but then you could do:
class CoerceList(UserList.UserList):
    def __getitem__(self, i):
        return self.data[coerce(i, 0)[0]]
    ... etc for setitem, has_key ...

But this seems like a lot of work just to add two methods (and it's gonna be
slow if you use it a lot).  Everyone knows what i = i + 1 means, and it's not
that hard to type.  On the other hand, IMHO it's a problem with python that
you can't subclass built-in types.

But __coerce__ is tons of fun.  If you ever find yourself bored, go through
all your code and make it use __coerce__ extensively.  After that, you'll
never have a dull moment again.



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