November 15

assigment_due_2006_11_29.py

Homework assignment due November 29

A Warning to PythonWin users

If you are using PythonWin to do this homework, you will get stuck on your first error. This page explains what to do about it.

Monkey Patch

Wikipedia article describing the Monkey Patch -- a technique for patching the behavior of a library at runtime without touching the source code for the library.

Python Cookbook

This website is a collection of recipes of Python code for many different things. If you are looking for a metaclass, decorator, or descriptor to do something fancy, then this is the place to go.

Lazy Attributes

An example recipe. Here a custom descriptor and metaclass allow you to define a class with attributes that will only be computed when needed. When the value is finally computed, it is stored in the object.

Cache Decorator

Another sample recipe. This decorator can be applied to any callable. It will cache the results of the computation, so that if the callable is invoked again with the same parameters the result will be fetched from the cache.