Multiple dispatch again

[David Mertz]

<David Mertz>
|> Now I can easily imaging that a method body would want to call on some
|> -specific- function that happened to be one of the multimethods.

"Samuele Pedroni" <pedronis at bluewin.ch> wrote previously:
|It really seems that the notion of multiple dispatching fill your mind
|with FUD <wink>.

Nah... my mind already becomes filled with FUD when I think of single
dispatch.  My naivety doesn't need the extra wrinkle.

|Your line of reasoning could be equally applied to single dispatch:

In my defense though, there IS a difference.  Every new-style child
class HAS a superclass--if nothing else, 'object' (or 'type').  If I
define some rules for multiple dispatch, I have no way of knowing within
the function bodies whether there even *is* a 'multi_super()' method to
call.  And whether there is can change at runtime (actually, I could
change it at runtime within that very function body, but that would be
perverse).

The way I handle things in my current implementation (only propogating
dispatch AT_END or AT_START) already includes generic guards to prevent
non-existing less specific methods from being called.  With a user
controlled multi_super(), you would need to add your own guards, and
change the flow to account for contingencies:

    def semi_specific(this, that):
        ...do stuff...
        try:    # maybe there is *some* less specific method
            val = multi_super()
        except NothingLessSpecificError:
            try_to_fix_things()
        ...more stuff...

Calling super() doesn't run into this problem.  Now I -could- try to do
something "safe" in multi_super() as a fallback.  A 'pass' is pretty
safe from an execution perspective.  But if 'semi_specific()' wants a
return value, there is no way a fallback can guess a usuable value.

Yours, David...

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