The Visitor Pattern in Python

2014-06-19 Tavian Barnes Comments

The visitor pattern is tremendously useful when working with certain kinds of information like abstract syntax trees. It’s basically a poor man’s version of sum types for languages that don’t natively support them. Unfortunately, they take advantage of function overloading, something which duck-typed languages like Python lack.

This blog post by Chris Lamb presents a clever workaround, but stops short of giving the actual implementation for the relevant decorators. The idea looks like this:

class Lion: pass
class Tiger: pass
class Bear: pass

class ZooVisitor:
    @visitor(Lion)
    def visit(self, animal):
        return "Lions"

    @visitor(Tiger)
    def visit(self, animal):
        return "tigers"

    @visitor(Bear)
    def visit(self, animal):
        return "and bears, oh my!"

animals = [Lion(), Tiger(), Bear()]
visitor = ZooVisitor()
print(', '.join(visitor.visit(animal) for animal in animals))
# Prints "Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my!"

It looks a little suspicious (after all, we’ve defined three conflicting methods on the same class), but you can write @visitor in a way that makes it work:

# A couple helper functions first

def _qualname(obj):
    """Get the fully-qualified name of an object (including module)."""
    return obj.__module__ + '.' + obj.__qualname__

def _declaring_class(obj):
    """Get the name of the class that declared an object."""
    name = _qualname(obj)
    return name[:name.rfind('.')]

# Stores the actual visitor methods
_methods = {}

# Delegating visitor implementation
def _visitor_impl(self, arg):
    """Actual visitor method implementation."""
    method = _methods[(_qualname(type(self)), type(arg))]
    return method(self, arg)

# The actual @visitor decorator
def visitor(arg_type):
    """Decorator that creates a visitor method."""

    def decorator(fn):
        declaring_class = _declaring_class(fn)
        _methods[(declaring_class, arg_type)] = fn

        # Replace all decorated methods with _visitor_impl
        return _visitor_impl

    return decorator

The trick here is that the decorator replaces all the visit methods with _visitor_impl (redefining an existing method is fine in Python). But before it does that, it stores the original method in a dictionary, _methods, keyed by the visitor class and the desired argument type. Then, when visit is invoked, _visitor_impl looks up the appropriate implementation and invokes it based on the argument type.

Comments

Kenji Noguchi 2015-01-30

Here is another implementation.
https://github.com/realistschuckle/pyvisitor

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The Visitor Pattern in Python

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