> could you explain why you think that expression has anything to do with multimethods?
You can override the behavior of a function based on the types involved. For instance ``coerce(a, b)`` calls ``a.__coerce__(b)``. By overriding ``__coerce__`` for one type you can customize this.
It seems to me there is a big difference between having a language that is truly based on multimethods and one where it is possible to implement multimethods fairly easily - from what I can see Python looks more like the latter.
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> could you explain why you think that expression has anything to do with multimethods?
You can override the behavior of a function based on the types involved. For instance ``coerce(a, b)`` calls ``a.__coerce__(b)``. By overriding ``__coerce__`` for one type you can customize this.
Do you then have to have conditional code in a.__coerce__(b) to check the type of b and do the appropriate thing?
Basically yes. Although there are ways around it: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=101605
Thanks - that looks quite neat.
It seems to me there is a big difference between having a language that is truly based on multimethods and one where it is possible to implement multimethods fairly easily - from what I can see Python looks more like the latter.