lazex 0.4.1

lazex (short for "lazy expressions") is a small library that enables your functions to customize how arguments are given to it. For example, such a function foo that you call with an expression, say foo(2 + 3) does not just get the value 5 as a parameter, but knows the 5 came from adding 2 and 3. In fact, it can even prevent evaluation of this expression and do whatever it wants with it.

In order to use this, you need to import the library:

import lazex

Next, decorate your functions with the decorator lazex.me. This is an identity function (the equivalent of lambda x: x):

@lazex.me
def foo(something):
    return something.evaluate()

A more realistic function might inspect the arguments and tell you how the result was obtained:

@latex.me
def explain(expr):
    return f"The answer to {expr.escaped} is [expr.evaluate()}"

If you now call explain(2+3), it will return you the string "The answer to (2 + 3) is 5".

Here's the catch: In order for this to work, the calling function must also have been decorated with latex.me. This is sadly a consequence of the fact that what we're doing here is not usually possible in Python.

Even without this decorator, you can still use lazex to define expressions in a given context that you may or may not want to evaluate later:

def outer():
    x = 7
    y = lazex.Expression('x * 14')
    inner(y)

def inner(expr):
    import random
    if random.random() > 0.5:
        print(expr.evaluate())

While this toy example may seem silly, you can wrap arbitrarily complex expressions. For example, you could delay a complex function call that might need to occur:

id_ = '1274897d129d24'
doc = complex.framework.get_document_by_id(id_, reticulate_splines='force')
delete = lazex.Expression(
    'complex.framework.delete_from_db('
    'doc, id_, safe_delete=True, cleanup=False,'
    'restore_function=complex.framework.restore_with_trick).confirmation_id'
)
process_document(doc, deleteexpr=delete)

Here, the process_document function may at some point decide that it needs to delete the document, and can just call delete.evaluate(). Sure, this is also solvable with a simple lambda, but if you were looking for straightforward, idiomatic solutions you've come to the wrong place.

Technical details

If you want to know how this works, just look at lazex.py, it's barely more than a hundred lines. Here's the gist:

• Register all functions decorated by lazex.me as magical lazex functions, and replace them with a wrapper.
• When the wrapper is run, we check if we have already patched the function. If so, we just call the original function with the given arguments.
• Otherwise, we patch it:
  • First, we use inspect.getsource() to get the original source code of the function.
  • Next, we parse the source code with ast.parse(). We then walk over all nodes of the AST, until we find an ast.Call (a function call):
  • We use the astunparse library to get a string representation of all expressions that are given as positional and keyword arguments, and replace the corresponding nodes with yet another ast.Call node that will call lazex.build_expression.
  • Effectively, this will replace a call like foo(1 + 2, x, bar=bat) with foo(build_expression("foo", "1 + 2"), build_expression("foo", "x"), bar=build_expression("foo", "bat")).
  • The modified AST is then fed to astunparse to generate source code, that source code is executed using compile() and the resulting code object is set as the new .__code__ attribute of the original function.
• We then execute the patched function with the original arguments. When we reach a call to build_expression, we use inspect.currentframe().f_back to get a reference to the previous execution frame, and use it to construct an Expression. The frame helps us retrieve its local and global namespace (the .f_locals and .f_globals attributes on the frame object).
• After saving these namespaces on our Expression instance, we can now use it to access the original source code, as well as the AST for this specific expression. When we want to evaluate the expression, we can use the namespaces with eval in order to produce the correct values.
• After having created the Expression objects, we then evaluate the name of the function that is supposed to be called with (possibly) escaped arguments. If it is not a registered lazex function, we evaluate the arguments immediately.
• Also, we search the Expression's AST for our build_expression hooks and remove them: They are unnecessary here and just leak implementation details.