Erik Max Francis wrote:
In dynamically-typed languages in general, explicit typechecks are not
a good idea, since they often preclude user-defined objects from being
used. Instead, try performing the call and catch the resulting
TypeError:
Good point, although I need to figure out if the thing can be called
without calling it, so I can build an appropriate UI. Basically I
expect three types of things in the 'value' field of the top-level
dictionary. The three sorts of things that I will deal with in the UI
are callable things (e.g. functions, for which Chris Mellon reminds me
about callable()), mappings (e.g. dictionaries, used similarly to the
top-level one), and sequences of strings.
So I think callable() works for me in the general case, but now
trawling the documentation in that area I'm not sure how I can tell if
something is a mapping or if it's a sequence.
The gist of the UI generation may be envisioned as:
key is the name that gets assigned to the control.
value indicates that the UI element is a:
"group box" if the value is a mapping
series of "radio buttons" if the value is a sequence of strings
"check box" if the value is a function
....I've still gotta figure out the exact API, this is for a plugin
sort of system that'll be used by the manually-driven version of the
build process and this data is explicitly to build the UI for the
various tools that are available.
thanks,
-tom!