pyoverload 1.0.2

'pyoverload' overloads the functions by simply using typehints and adding decorator '@overload'.

pyoverload

Introduction

pyoverload is a package affiliated to project pyctlib. It is a powerful overloading tools to provide easy overload for python v3.6+. pyoverload provide multiple usages. The simplest one, however, can be easily implemented as follows.

>>> from pyoverload import overload
>>> @overload
... def func(x: int):
...     print("func1", x)
...
>>> @overload
... def func(x: str):
...     print("func2", x)
...
>>> func(1)
func1 1
>>> func("1")
func2 1

pyoverload has all of following appealing features:

1. Support of Jedi auto-completion by keyword decorator @overload. This means all main-stream python IDE can hint you the overloaded functions you have defined.
2. Multiple usages that are user friendly for all kinds of users, including C/Java language system users and those who are used to singledispatch based overload. Also, easy collector of ordinary python functions is also provided.
3. Support of all kinds of functions, including functions, methods, class methods and static methods. One simple implementation for all.
4. String types supported. This means that one can use "numpy.ndarray" to mark a numpy array without importing the whole package.
5. Sufficient built-in types are provided for easy representations such as List[Int], Dict@{str: int} or List<<int>>[10].
6. Available usage listing when no overload function matches the input arguments.
7. Type constraint for an ordinary function using @params decorator.

Installation

This package can be installed by pip install pyoverload or moving the source code to the directory of python libraries (the source code can be downloaded on github or PyPI).

pip install pyoverload

Usages

Usage 1: Decorator Fashion

One can use @overload before the functions with the same function name to build an overloaded function. When the function is called, the inputs will be handed out to the suitable implementation.

The types of the input arguments are specified by the typehints available in python3.6+. All known types can be added after the colon. For package classes like np.ndarray, please use a string to represent it. For more types, one can use types from package types or pyoverload.typehint.

For usage of pyoverload.typehint, please refer to section Typehints for more information.

All implementations of the overloaded function are referenced in the order of definition, but the implementation ends with __default__ or __0__ will be used when no usage is available. Note that there are four underlines for this notation, two on each side.

>>> from pyoverload import overload
>>> from pyoverload.typehint import *
>>> import numpy as np
>>> @overload
... def func__default__(x):
... 	print("func1", x)
...
>>> @overload
... def func(x: int):
... 	print("func2", x)
...
>>> @overload
... def func(x: str):
... 	print("func3", x)
...
>>> @overload
... def func(x: List<<Int>>[4]):
... 	print("func4", x)
...
>>> @overload
... def func(x: 'np.ndarray'):
... 	print("func5", x)
...
>>> func(1)
func2 1
>>> func("1")
func3 1
>>> func([1,2,3,4])
func4 [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> func(np.array([1,2,3,4]))
func5 [1 2 3 4]
>>> func(1.)
func1 1.0

Note that the auto-completion by Jedi can only work for this usage.

Usage 2: Registering Fashion

After using @overload decorator, apart from using @overload to decorate functions with the same name, one can also use the decorator with the function name @{fill in the function name} to decorate other functions with relevant names like func1, func_str, first_func for function func. However, omitting sign _ is recommended for these functions.

In this fashion, the default function is the one decorated with @overload though it can still be changed by adding __default__ or __0__ tags in the decorated function names. All typehints are the same as the first usage.

The following example realized the first three functions in the usage 1 example in a reimplementation.

>>> from pyoverload import overload
>>> @overload
... def func(x):
... 	print("func1", x)
... 
>>> @func
... def func2(x: int):
... 	print("func2", x)
... 
>>> @func
... def _(x: str):
... 	print("func3", x)
... 

Note that usage 1 and usage 2 can be used together though you may need to specify the default function manually like in usage 1 if needed. The last example is rewrote in a combined style.

>>> from pyoverload import overload
>>> @overload
... def func__default__(x):
... 	print("func1", x)
...
>>> @overload
... def func(x: int):
... 	print("func2", x)
... 
>>> @func
... def _(x: str):
... 	print("func3", x)
... 

Usage 3: Collector Fashion

The last possible usage can not be used along with the previous two, or at least this is not tested by the developer and is not recommended. Another decorator @override is used as a collector.

In this usage, all functions should have different names and all functions with typehints should add decorator @params to activate the typehint regularization. Collector @override takes additional function list as the arguments indicating these functions should be packed into a single function.

Note that the last function in the function list is the default function.

>>> from pyoverload import override, params
>>> @params
... def func_all(x):
... 	print("func1", x)
... 
>>> @params
... def func_int(x: int):
... 	print("func2", x)
... 
>>> @params
... def func_str(x: str):
... 	print("func3", x)
... 
>>> @override(func_int, func_str, func_all)
... def func(): pass
... 

Theoretically, decorator @override can also be used in usages 1&2, but this is not recommended either.

Usage List

When an overloaded function receives arguments that are not suitable for all implementations, the error information will tell you which ones are correct.

>>> from pyoverload import overload
>>> @overload
... def func(x: int):
...     print("func1", x)
...
>>> @overload
... def func(x: str):
...     print("func2", x)
...
>>> func(1.)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  [...omitted...]
NameError: No func() matches arguments 1.0. All available usages are:
func(x:int)
func(x:str)

This function is available for all three usages.

Typehints

Decorator @params enables functions to reject inputs with wrong types by raising TypeHintError. One can use it directly to decorate functions with python typehints or one can add some arguments to it. In the following example, we apply the condition that a is a function, b is an integer, k is a series of integers while function test_func needs to return an iterable type of real numbers with length 2.

>>> from pyoverload.typehint import *
>>> @params(Func, Int, +Int, __return__ = Real[2])
... def test_func(a, b=2, *k):
...     print(a, b, k)
...     return k
...
>>> test_func(lambda x: 1, 3, 4, 5)
<function <lambda> at 0x7fbdb2027f70> 3 (4, 5)
(4, 5)

The basic types in pyoverload.typehint are Bool, Int, Float, Str, Set, List, Tuple, Dict, Callable, Function, Method, Lambda, Func, Real, Iterable, Null, Array, Scalar, IntScalar, FloatScalar. Among which,

1. callable contains all callable objects including callable classes while Func consists all kinds of actual functions. Function, however, only refer to explicitly defined functions, and Method and Lambda refer to the class methods and anonymous functions respectively. These three types are all contained in type Func.
2. Real is a pyoverload.typehint.Type while real, a list [int, float], is not.
3. null is the type of element None while Null is the pyoverload.typehint.Type form of it.
4. Array is the type of package based tensors. Only the tensors of numpy, torch, tensorflow and torchplus are currently supported.
5. Three types of Scalars support the array variables.

All these types are subclasses of type and instances of pyoverload.typehint.Type which will be abbreviated as Type in the following introduction.

One can use Type(int) to convert a python type like int to a Type or use Type(int, float) to combine multiple existing types. Recurrence is also acceptable, Type(Type(int, float), Type(str)) is equivalent to Type(int, float, str). It will be better if a keyword name is also assigned.

For a Type, List for example, we can do the following operations:

1. +List: This indicates that this is an extendable argument, which means it decorates arguments after *. Commonly, it is only used for arguments @params decorator.
2. ~List: This invert the typehint, meaning that all non-list types.
3. List[5]: For iterable types, this indicates the length or shape of the variable. For other types such as Int[5], this indicates an iterable of length 5 with integer elements.
4. List@[int, str]: For iterable types only, this indicates that the list has 2 elements, and the first one is an integer while the second is a string.
5. List<<int>>[10]: For iterable types only, at least one of the two types should be a Type. The representation refers to an integer list of length 10. This is equivalent to List[10]@int. The length or shape is not specified if a pair of empty blankets is given.
6. List[int]: =List@int=List<<int>>[]. Not recommended usage, but this representation is also valid.
7. len(List[10, 20]): Function len returns the length of the array. 200 should be the result for the given example.
8. Dict@{str: int}: Operation 4 can be extended to dictionary in this format.

Acknowledgment

@Yiteng Zhang: Tests and Maintenance