Feature request: String-inferred names

[The Music Guy]

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>
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 9:39 PM, Steven D'Aprano <
steve at remove-this-cybersource.com.au> wrote:

>
> Removing code redundancy is all very well, but beware of turning into an
>
>> architecture astronaut:
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>>
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
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>>
> There is such a thing as over-generalisation -- if you're having to
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>> struggle to get the abstract code working abstractly enough, you're
> probably over-generalising.
>

That's an interesting article, but I don't really understand what the
author's point is. It's okay to generalize, but don't make a big fuss about
it? It's okay, but don't do it anyway? I honestly can't tell. He seems to
be criticizing a lot of good products (like Java), not because they are
generalizations exactly, but because there is too much hype surrounding
them.

>
Anyway, I'm not generalizing for the sake of generalizing. I'm generalizing
because it appears to be a logical solution to a _specific_ problem, namely
the fact that nearly identical class definition code was being repeated in
several classes with only a few minor details difference. If it were a
regular processing problem, a function would be created to do the repeated
work, but since the redundancy occurs before any processing has occurred in
the traditional sense, the redundancies have to be collected in a
_different_ way.

>
Now that I think about it, though, Python 2.6 and above support decorators
on classes (an example of generalization, by the way). The metaclass code
could be moved almost verbatim to a decorator function which could then be
used on classes that needed it. It would still be a mess, though.

>
hm...actually, inhahe's code made me realize that the metaclass could be
cleaned up even more than I originally thought by the proposed syntax
because it could be used for naming functions as well as attributes. ;^_^

>

>
> > The code worked very
>
>> > well, and allowed for the pattern to be added to any class by using a
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>> > single, short line of code (something along the lines of __class_attr =
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>> > { key: value }). Not only that, but the metaclass code itself was
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>> > comprised of less than a screenful of code after docstrings and comments
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>> > had been removed. However, the code was (and still is) very difficult to
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>> > follow simply because of the way getters and setters had to be used to
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>> > generate the methods and properties.
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>>
> That's good evidence that you've over-generalised.
>

I don't follow. Could you please be more specific? (no pun intended)
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