On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > I've been known to monkey-patch builtins in the interactive interpreter and > in test code. One example that comes to mind is that I had some > over-complicated recursive while loop (!), and I wanted to work out the Big > Oh behaviour so I knew exactly how horrible it was. Working it out from > first principles was too hard, so I cheated: I knew each iteration called > len() exactly once, so I monkey-patched len() to count how many times it was > called. Problem solved.
But why couldn't you edit the source code? > I also have a statistics package that has its own version of sum, and I rely > on calls to sum() from within the package picking up my version rather than > the builtin one. As long as you have a definition or import of sum at the top of (or really anywhere in) the module, that will still work. It's only if you were to do things like import builtins builtins.len = ... (whether inside your package or elsewhere) that things would stop working with the proposed optimization. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
