Crimes with Python's Pattern Matching • Hillel Wayne

#artificialintelligence 

One of my favorite little bits of python is __subclasshook__. Abstract Base Classes with __subclasshook__ can define what counts as a subclass of the ABC, even if the target doesn't know about the ABC. You can do some weird stuff with this. Back in 2019 I used it to create non-monotonic types, where something counts as a NotIterable if it doesn't have the __iter__ method. There wasn't anything too diabolical you could do with this: nothing in Python really interacted with ABCs, limiting the damage you could do with production code.