Did you know about this Python feature?

Key Takeaways

the single dispatch. So I say from funk tools import single dispatch. Now this is a decorator that you can put on top of some kind of function. So in this case we defined a describe function. We decorated it with single dispatch and then we just said okay we're going to raise the notimplemented error and this will be kind of the fallback or the backup implementation of our particular function. Then below this we write four functions that have a concrete implementation based on the type of the first parameter. So we have an object and if the object is of type int and we call the describe function, we're going to run this implementation, the one that starts with an underscore. Same thing with this. If the object is of type string, then we're going to run this function right here because it's registered to this describe function name. And if I run this code using the single dispatch, you can see that we call the appropriate function based on the type of our first parameter. So again, what you can do is you can define this function. You give it a name, something like describe. You decorate it with single dispatch and then what this allows you to do is register various other functions here where you specify that you want the function to have the exact same name. It's going to take the exact same parameter, but if the parameter is of type int, then you execute this implementation. If it's string, then you do this implementation. If it's dict, then you do this implementation. And it avoids you having to do this kind of pattern where you're doing all of these if statement checks. Now, there's advantages and disadvantages of this, but it allows you to create what's known as a generic function that can handle various different types of data and to separate all of those implementations into separate functions, which can be a little bit easier to understand. and to add various different implementations