Yesterday I had a problem I ended up solving another way, but my first approach required a lazy dictionary. That is, a dictionary filled with the results of some other function, but also one that only evaluated this computation when the dictionary was first accessed. Here’s a silly example use case:
class LazyDictionary(object): def __init__(self, callback=dict): self.data = None self.callback = callback def evaluate_callback(self): self.data = self.callback() def __getitem__(self, name): if(self.data is None): self.evaluate_callback() return self.data.__getitem__(name) def __setitem__(self, name, value): if(self.data is None): self.evaluate_callback() return self.data.__setitem__(name, value) def __getattr__(self, name): if(self.data is None): self.evaluate_callback() return getattr(self.data, name)
The real version I started to use (and then threw out because it was not needed) inherited from a dict instead of using delegation. At the time I thought this was necessary to get it to play nice with the Django templating system (I may have been wrong about this). Anyways, I like this version much better, and I view inheritance for the composition of behavior with growing skepticism each day.
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