[Tutor] adding methods to native types

[Erik Price]

Pardon me for asking such a strange question (perhaps), but is there 
any way to add methods to the native types in Python?  I wrote my first 
Python script in a long time today and I pined for the length() method 
of Java's List type -- it took me a while to figure out that there's no 
way to determine the length of a list using a list method, you have to 
use the len() function.

It led me to wonder if it's possible to subclass the native types in 
Python and add additional features.  If not, there's nothing to stop 
one from composing the list within another class and adding the 
additional features, which actually relieves me of the burden of 
ensuring that the subclass is completely compatible with the 
internal/external implementation of the base class, but I'm curious if 
you can do it.

Essentially, I prefer

"string".split("")

to

split("", string)

and wanted to do

list.len()

instead of

len(list)



Thanks,

Erik





-- 
Erik Price

email: erikprice@mac.com
jabber: erikprice@jabber.org