Python function overloading

Question

I know that Python does not support method overloading, but I've run into a problem that I can't seem to solve in a nice Pythonic way.

I am making a game where a character needs to shoot a variety of bullets, but how do I write different functions for creating these bullets? For example suppose I have a function that creates a bullet travelling from point A to B with a given speed. I would write a function like this:

    def add_bullet(sprite, start, headto, speed):
        ... Code ...

But I want to write other functions for creating bullets like:

    def add_bullet(sprite, start, direction, speed):
    def add_bullet(sprite, start, headto, spead, acceleration):
    def add_bullet(sprite, script): # For bullets that are controlled by a script
    def add_bullet(sprite, curve, speed): # for bullets with curved paths
    ... And so on ...

And so on with many variations. Is there a better way to do it without using so many keyword arguments cause its getting kinda ugly fast. Renaming each function is pretty bad too because you get either add_bullet1, add_bullet2, or add_bullet_with_really_long_name.

To address some answers:

1. No I can't create a Bullet class hierarchy because thats too slow. The actual code for managing bullets is in C and my functions are wrappers around C API.

2. I know about the keyword arguments but checking for all sorts of combinations of parameters is getting annoying, but default arguments help allot like acceleration=0

Answer 1

What you are asking for is called multiple dispatch. See Julia language examples which demonstrates different types of dispatches.

However, before looking at that, we'll first tackle why overloading is not really what you want in python.

Why Not Overloading?

First, one needs to understand the concept of overloading and why it's not applicable to python.

When working with languages that can discriminate data types at compile-time, selecting among the alternatives can occur at compile-time. The act of creating such alternative functions for compile-time selection is usually referred to as overloading a function. (Wikipedia)

Python is a dynamically typed language, so the concept of overloading simply does not apply to it. However, all is not lost, since we can create such alternative functions at run-time:

In programming languages that defer data type identification until run-time the selection among alternative functions must occur at run-time, based on the dynamically determined types of function arguments. Functions whose alternative implementations are selected in this manner are referred to most generally as multimethods. (Wikipedia)

So we should be able to do multimethods in python—or, as it is alternatively called: multiple dispatch.

Multiple dispatch

The multimethods are also called multiple dispatch:

Multiple dispatch or multimethods is the feature of some object-oriented programming languages in which a function or method can be dynamically dispatched based on the run time (dynamic) type of more than one of its arguments. (Wikipedia)

Python does not support this out of the box¹, but, as it happens, there is an excellent python package called multipledispatch that does exactly that.

Solution

Here is how we might use multipledispatch² package to implement your methods:

>>> from multipledispatch import dispatch
>>> from collections import namedtuple  
>>> from types import *  # we can test for lambda type, e.g.:
>>> type(lambda a: 1) == LambdaType
True

>>> Sprite = namedtuple('Sprite', ['name'])
>>> Point = namedtuple('Point', ['x', 'y'])
>>> Curve = namedtuple('Curve', ['x', 'y', 'z'])
>>> Vector = namedtuple('Vector', ['x','y','z'])

>>> @dispatch(Sprite, Point, Vector, int)
... def add_bullet(sprite, start, direction, speed):
...     print("Called Version 1")
...
>>> @dispatch(Sprite, Point, Point, int, float)
... def add_bullet(sprite, start, headto, speed, acceleration):
...     print("Called version 2")
...
>>> @dispatch(Sprite, LambdaType)
... def add_bullet(sprite, script):
...     print("Called version 3")
...
>>> @dispatch(Sprite, Curve, int)
... def add_bullet(sprite, curve, speed):
...     print("Called version 4")
...

>>> sprite = Sprite('Turtle')
>>> start = Point(1,2)
>>> direction = Vector(1,1,1)
>>> speed = 100 #km/h
>>> acceleration = 5.0 #m/s
>>> script = lambda sprite: sprite.x * 2
>>> curve = Curve(3, 1, 4)
>>> headto = Point(100, 100) # somewhere far away

>>> add_bullet(sprite, start, direction, speed)
Called Version 1

>>> add_bullet(sprite, start, headto, speed, acceleration)
Called version 2

>>> add_bullet(sprite, script)
Called version 3

>>> add_bullet(sprite, curve, speed)
Called version 4

<sub>1. Python 3 currently supports single dispatch
2. Take care not to use multipledispatch in a multi-threaded environment or you will get weird behavior.</sub>