Lorenzo Di Gregorio wrote:
> I've been using Python for some DES simulations because we don't need
> full C speed and it's so much faster for writing models. During
> coding I find it handy to assign a variable *unless it has been
> already assigned*: I've found that this is often referred to as "once"
> assigment.
>
> The best I could come up with in Python is:
>
> try:
> variable
> except NameError:
> variable = method()
>
> I wonder if sombody has a solution (trick, whatever ...) which looks
> more compact in coding. Something like:
>
> once(variable, method)
>
> doesn't work, but it would be perfect. Of course I can preprocess the
> Python code but an all-Python solution would be more handy.
>
> Any suggestions?
You can use properties to implement lazy evaluation. Or you can rely on a
naming convention:
>>> class Once(object):
... def __getattr__(self, name):
... if name.startswith("_calc_"):
... raise AttributeError("No method to calculate attribute
%r" % name[6:])
... value = getattr(self, "_calc_" + name)()
... setattr(self, name, value)
... return value
...
>>> class A(Once):
... def _calc_foo(self):
... print "calculating foo"
... return 42
...
>>> a = A()
>>> a.foo
calculating foo
42
>>> a.foo
42
>>> a.bar
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 5, in __getattr__
File "<stdin>", line 4, in __getattr__
AttributeError: No method to calculate attribute 'bar'
>>> a._calc_bar = lambda: "bar-value"
>>> a.bar
'bar-value'
Peter
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