I just read about Python 3.4’s release notes. I found a nice little gem.
I didn’t know what “Single Dispatch Functions” were all about. Sounded very abstract. But it’s actually pretty cool, and covered in PEP 443.
What’s going on here is that Python has added support for another kind of polymorphism known as “single dispatch”. This allows you to write a function with several implementations, each associated with one or more types of input arguments. The “dispatcher” (called singledispatch and implemented as a Python function decorator) figures out which implementation to choose based on the type of the argument. It also maintains a registry of types to function implementations.
This is not technically “multimethods” — which can also be implemented as a decorator, as GvR did in 2005 — but it’s related. See the Wikipedia article on Dynamic Dispatch for more information.
Also, the other interesting thing about this change is that the library is already on Bitbucket and PyPI and has been tested to work as a backport with Python 2.6+. So you can start using this today, even if you’re not on 3.x!
Continue reading Functional dynamic dispatch with Python’s new singledispatch decorator in functools