Does a syntax for this exist? In any language?
- by Michael
It seems pretty common to me to have an argument, in a dynamically typed language that is either an Object or a key to lookup that object. For instance when I'm working with a database I might have a method getMyRelatedStuff(person)
All I really need to lookup the related stuff is the id of the person so my method could look like this in python:
def getMyRelatedStuff(person_or_id):
id = person_or_id.id if isinstance(person,User) else person_or_id
#do some lookup
Or going the other direction:
def someFileStuff(file_or_name):
file = file_or_name if hasattr(file,'write') else open(file_or_name)
