FamousWhy Editor:
PyMultimethods is a famous software because it provides a pythonic library for implementing multimethods such as generic methods, generic functions, multiple dispatch.

Multimethods are functions that exhibit polymorphic behaviour, where all of the function arguments are considered during dispatch.

Functionality is exposed via function decorator or, optionally, a direct class interface.

Features :

- Dispatch by type
- Dispatch by value
- Invoking multimethods using positional arguments
- Invoking multimethods using keyword arguments
- Implementing class methods as multimethods
- Function decorator?, allowing simple, intuitive registration? of multimethods
- Automated Test Suite?
- Extend multimethods in the global registry (automatic, by function name) or by explicitly specifying which multimethod to extend (via extend() method).

The concept of multimethods is similar to the concepts of overriding and overloading that are present in C++, Java, and other statically-typed languages.

The difference between PyMultimethods and overloading in these other languages is that PyMultimethods selects the actual function to call at run-time, versus compile-time for C++ and Java. In this respect, multimethods are similar to overriding. In fact, multimethods could be described as extending the concept of overriding to multiple (instead of just the implicit self/this) parameters. (On the other hand, C++/Java's overriding/single-dispatch could just as easily be described as a special case of multimethods.)

Publisher: Nathan Davis

Tags: python library, python programming,