One of the Most Critical Pillars of OOP is Missing from Python

But here's how to introduce it.

Oct 30, 2023

One thing I have always hated about Python OOP is that Python provides no native support for function overloading.

Function overloading is critical to polymorphism, wherein, we may have multiple functions with:

Same name, and
Different number (or type) of parameters.

But in Python, if we define two (or more) functions with the same name and different parameters, Python will only consider the latest definition corresponding to that function name.

This is depicted below.

As depicted above, the latest definition of add() had three parameters. That is why passing two arguments raised an error.

This restricts us from writing good polymorphic code in Python.

Of course, there are ways to prevent this error, as depicted below:

Also, if the same parameter can take multiple data types, we can write (somewhat) polymorphic code by adding multiple check statements using isinstance().

But this isn’t as elegant as defining multiple functions with different data types like we can do in, say, C++, is it?

C++ automatically invokes the correct method corresponding to the argument data type.

Lately, while exploring this for one of my projects, I found a pretty handy way to enable function overloading in Python and thought it’d be quite useful for many of you.

The @dispatch decorator from the Multidispatch library allows us to leverage the standard and elegant function overloading in Python, as demonstrated below:

As depicted above, we have multiple functions with the same name and different parameters.

The @dispatch decorator allows us to invoke the correct function corresponding to the parameters passed during the function call.

Another cool thing about the @dispatch decorator is that it raises an error when the function call does not match any of the function definitions:

This allows us to identify errors which can often go unnoticed.

Isn’t that cool?

In a dummy experimentation, I did notice a slight increment in the run time. But the order of increase was in nanoseconds or so, which can be safely ignored.

👉 Over to you: What other cool Python libraries you are aware of?

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