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In computer science, type conversion, [1] [2] type casting, [1] [3] type coercion, [3] and type juggling [4] [5] are different ways of changing an expression from one data type to another. An example would be the conversion of an integer value into a floating point value or its textual representation as a string , and vice versa.
In class-based programming, downcasting, or type refinement, is the act of casting a base or parent class reference, to a more restricted derived class reference. [1] This is only allowable if the object is already an instance of the derived class, and so this conversion is inherently fallible.
The decorator pattern is a design pattern used in statically-typed object-oriented programming languages to allow functionality to be added to objects at run time; Python decorators add functionality to functions and methods at definition time, and thus are a higher-level construct than decorator-pattern classes.
The reinterpret cast technique from C/C++ also works in Pascal. This can be useful, when eg. reading dwords from a byte stream, and we want to treat them as float. Here is a working example, where we reinterpret-cast a dword to a float:
Python makes a distinction between lists and tuples. Lists are written as [1, 2, 3], are mutable, and cannot be used as the keys of dictionaries (dictionary keys must be immutable in Python). Tuples, written as (1, 2, 3), are immutable and thus can be used as keys of dictionaries, provided all of the tuple's elements are immutable.
A built-in function, or builtin function, or intrinsic function, is a function for which the compiler generates code at compile time or provides in a way other than for other functions. [23] A built-in function does not need to be defined like other functions since it is built in to the programming language. [24]
Introspection should not be confused with reflection, which goes a step further and is the ability for a program to manipulate the metadata, properties, and functions of an object at runtime. Some programming languages also possess that capability (e.g., Java, Python, Julia, and Go).
A function signature consists of the function prototype. It specifies the general information about a function like the name, scope and parameters. Many programming languages use name mangling in order to pass along more semantic information from the compilers to the linkers. In addition to mangling, there is an excess of information in a ...