[Zope3-dev] N-Tuple Adapters

[Steve Alexander]

>  An n-tuple adapter registry is the digital version of
> MacGuyver: you have a chess board, a clothesline, a match, and shoes. 
> How are you going to start that car? ;-)  

So long as you know in what order MacGuyver would order that tuple .


> I've been thinking about ways to deal with this, but I'd like some input 
> on the general idea first.  Do you think n-tuple adapters would be 
> generally useful?

Well, I can think of uses up to two- or maybe three-tuple adapters.


> Is there a way to think about them that would reduce 
> or eliminate the deep search?

Have a smart registry that "expands" a single registration into all of 
the other registrations that it implies.
This would be a way of providing "transitive adaption" too. That is, if 
I can adapt A->B and B->C, the system should allow me to adapt from A->C.


> Is there any research on this topic or something similar?

Multimethods? http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MultiMethods
Multiple dispatch? http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MultipleDispatch

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExternalPolymorphism
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GenericFunction

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~cleeland/papers/index.html

http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/www/Papers/dispatching.html

The perl Class::Multimethods module
http://search.cpan.org/author/DCONWAY/Class-Multimethods-1.70/lib/Class/Multimethods.pod

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2003/05/29/multimethods.html

I'll stop there :)

--
Steve Alexander