Intro

Have you heard of Jython? It's a variant of Python written in Java instead of C; it lets you use native Java classes in python code. The most common use case is integration with large existing Java codebases: You can reuse Java code and still get the readability and conciseness of python.

I was thinking about types in Python, particularly how it allows primitive operators to be overridden (+-/*%). For those unfamiliar with Python classes, check out my previous post; essentially it uses methods like __add__, __sub__, etc. as interfaces. This lets you do things like

>>> [4] + [3]
[4, 3]
>>> [4] * 3
[4, 4, 4]

which would throw nasty exceptions in most other languages.

Because python allows any type to be called with these methods, it's the responsibility of the class implementing the interface to ensure type safety, for example 42 - '2' will throw TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'int' and 'str'.

I thought to myself, this looks doable.

Reflections

Java has a rarely-used but very powerful reflection API. This allows you to do anything from get the class of a variable at runtime (and do different things depending on which class it is) to get the methods and constructors of an unknown class. My (primitive) implementation of Jython make heavy use of reflections to use the builtin Java classes and avoiding writing an interpreter from scratch.

Duck Typing

Since python doesn't enforce types, we won't either. That means we have to call methods at runtime, without knowing the class of the variable. Java lets you do this!

[//]: # Secondly, since we want to allow inheritance, we have to find the constructors at runtime. [//]: # This can be done as well, [//]: # but since we want the types to match, we have to iterate all the constructors until we find one that's compatible.

API

The current API is exactly one class, NumberWrapper, which does nothing more than type promotion (and demotion). I'm currently working on a ListWrapper which would demonstrate the power of duck typing more clearly. Because this is a toy project (and because parsing is hard), I have not implemented an interpreter; the sample usage would be add(new NumberWrapper(5), new NumberWrapper(-.14)).

The full code is available here. Its output is as follows:

$ javac jython.java -Xlint:unchecked
$ java main
3.5

Note that despite the extensive use of duck typing there are no type warnings; javac emits warnings only for casts, not calls to the reflection API.