Generic function in python

There times in python’s land when you needs to have different kind of behaviour for a function depending upon the type of arguments.

Decorator singledispatch from functools module from python 3.4 can help us out to create a different definitions of a with common interface.

we can define a generic definition of a function and can call same function with different set of arguments type:

fun("python land") 
fun(23, True)
fun([11, 22, 33])
fun(object())

This is how a generic function will look:

from functools import singledispatch
@singledispatch
def fun(arg, verbose=False):
    if verbose:
        print("verbosing....")
    print(arg)

Now different behaviour can be defined for this generic function

@fun.register(int)
def fun_int(arg, verbose=False):
    if verbose:
        print("numbers: ", end=" ")
    print(arg)

@fun.register(list)
def fun_list(arg, verbose=False):
    if verbose:
        print("Enumerate this:")
    print([ele+1 for ele in arg])

@fun.register(object)
def fun_int(arg):
    print(arg.__class__)

source code can be found here

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