[python] python doesn't provide the feature of overloading. workarounds?

source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12179271/python-classmethod-and-staticmethod-for-beginner

Though classmethod and staticmethod are quite similar, there's a slight difference in usage for both entities: classmethod must have a reference to a class object as the first parameter, whereas staticmethod can have no parameters at all.

Let's look at all that was said in real examples.

Boilerplate

Let's assume an example of a class, dealing with date information (this is what will be our boilerplate to cook on):

class Date(object):

    day = 0
    month = 0
    year = 0

    def __init__(self, day=0, month=0, year=0):
        self.day = day
        self.month = month
        self.year = year

This class obviously could be used to store information about certain dates (without timezone information; let's assume all dates are presented in UTC).

Here we have __init__, a typical initializer of Python class instances, which receives arguments as a typical instancemethod, having the first non-optional argument (self) that holds reference to a newly created instance.

Classmethod

We have some tasks that can be nicely done using classmethods.

Let's assume that we want to create a lot of Date class instances having date information coming from outer source encoded as a string of next format ('dd-mm-yyyy'). We have to do that in different places of our source code in project.

So what we must do here is:

1. Parse a string to receive day, month and year as thee integer variables or a 3-item tuple consisting of that variable.
2. Instantiate Date by passing those values to initialization call.

This will look like:

day, month, year = map(int, string_date.split('-'))
date1 = Date(day, month, year)

For this purpose, C++ has such feature as overloading, but Python lacks that feature- so here's when classmethod applies. Lets create another "constructor".

    @classmethod
    def from_string(cls, date_as_string):
        day, month, year = map(int, date_as_string.split('-'))
        date1 = cls(day, month, year)
        return date1

date2 = Date.from_string('11-09-2012')

Let's look more carefully at the above implementation, and review what advantages we have here:

1. We've implemented date string parsing in one place and it's reusable now.
2. Encapsulation works fine here (if you think that you could implement string parsing as a single function elsewher, this solution fits OOP paradigm far better).
3. cls is an object that holds class itself, not an instance of the class. It's pretty cool because if we inherit our Date class, all children will have from_string defined also.

Staticmethod

What about staticmethod? It's pretty similar to classmethod but doesn't take any obligatory parameters (like classmethod or instancemethod does).

Let's look at the next use case.

We have a date string that we want to validate somehow. This task is also logically bound to Date class we've used so far, but still doesn't require instantiation of it.

Here is where staticmethod can be useful. Let's look at the next piece of code:

    @staticmethod
    def is_date_valid(date_as_string):
        day, month, year = map(int, date_as_string.split('-'))
        return day <= 31 and month <= 12 and year <= 3999

So, as we can see from usage of staticmethod, we don't have any access to what the class is- it's basically just a function, called syntactically like a method, but without access to the object and it's internals (fields and another methods), while classmethod does.