Hello,
I have a program where I'm overriding the retrieval of items from a list.
As background: The data held by the lists are calculated but then read
potentially many times thereafter, so in order to prevent needless
re-calculating the same value over and over, and to remove checking/caching
code from the calculation logic code, I therefore created a subclass of
list that will automatically calculate the value in a given slot
automatically if not yet calculated. (So differently put, I'm implemented a
kind of list specific caching/memoization with the intent that it should be
transparent to the client code.)
The way I've implemented this so far was to simply override
list.__getitem__(self, key) to check if the value needs to be calculated or
not and call a calculation method if required, after which the value is
returned as normal. On subsequent calls __getitem__ then directly returns
the value without calculating it again.
This worked mostly fine, however yesterday I ran into a slightly unexpected
problem when I found that when the list contents is iterated over and
values retrieved that way rather than via [], then __getitem__ is in fact
*not* called on the list to read the item values from the list, and
consequently I get back the "not yet calculated" entries in the list,
without the calculation routine being automatically called as is intended.
Here's a test application that demonstrates the issue:
class NotYetCalculated:
pass
class CalcList(list):
def __init__(self, calcitem):
super(CalcList, self).__init__()
self.calcitem = calcitem
def __getitem__(self, key):
"""Override __getitem__ to call self.calcitem() if needed"""
print "CalcList.__getitem__(): Enter"
value = super(CalcList, self).__getitem__(key)
if value is NotYetCalculated:
print "CalcList.__getitem__(): calculating"
value = self.calcitem(key)
self[key] = value
print "CalcList.__getitem__(): return"
return value
def calcitem(key):
# Demo: return square of index
return key*key
def main():
# Create a list that calculates its contents via a given
# method/fn onece only
l = CalcList(calcitem)
# Extend with few entries to demonstrate issue:
l.extend([NotYetCalculated, NotYetCalculated, NotYetCalculated,
NotYetCalculated])
print "1) Directly getting values from list works as expected:
__getitem__ is called:"
print "Retrieving value [2]:\n", l[2]
print
print "Retrieving value [3]:\n", l[3]
print
print "Retrieving value [2] again (no calculation this time):\n", l[2]
print
print "Retrieving values via an iterator doesn't work as expected:"
print "(__getitem__ is not called and the code returns "
print " NotYetCalcualted entries without calling __getitem__. How do I
fix this?)"
print "List contents:"
for x in l: print x
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
To reiterate:
What should happen: In test 2) above all entries should be automatically
calculated and output should be numbers only.
What actually happens: In test 2) above the first 2 list entries
corresponding to list indexes 0 and 1 are output as "NotYetCalculated" and
calcitem is not called when required.
What's the best way to fix this problem? Do I need to maybe override
another method, perhaps provide my own iterator implementation? For that
matter, why doesn't iterating over the list contents fall back to calling
__getitem__?
Thanks in advance,
Walter
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