Greetings, currently I am refactoring one of my programs, and I found an interesting problem.
I have Transitions in an automata. Transitions always have a start-state and an end-state. Some Transitions have a label, which encodes a certain Action that must be performed upon traversal. No label means no action. Some transitions have a condition, which must be fulfilled in order to traverse this condition, if there is no condition, the transition is basically an epsilon-transition in an NFA and will be traversed without consuming an input symbol.
I need the following operations:
check if the transition has a label
get this label
add a label to a transition
check if the transition has a condition
get this condition
check for equality
Judging from the first five points, this sounds like a clear decorator, with a base transition and two decorators: Labeled and Condition. However, this approach has a problem: two transitions are considered equal if their start-state and end-state are the same, the labels at both transitions are equal (or not-existing) and both conditions are the same (or not existing). With a decorator, I might have two transitions Labeled("foo", Conditional("bar", Transition("baz", "qux"))) and Conditional("bar", Labeled("foo", Transition("baz", "qux"))) which need a non-local equality, that is, the decorators would need to collect all the data and the Transition must compare this collected data on a set-base:
class Transition(object):
def __init__(self, start, end):
self.start = start
self.end = end
def get_label(self):
return None
def has_label(self):
return False
def collect_decorations(self, decorations):
return decorations
def internal_equality(self, my_decorations, other):
try:
return (self.start == other.start
and self.end == other.end
and my_decorations = other.collect_decorations())
def __eq__(self, other):
return self.internal_equality(self.collect_decorations({}), other)
class Labeled(object):
def __init__(self, label, base):
self.base = base
self.label = label
def has_label(self):
return True
def get_label(self):
return self.label
def collect_decorations(self, decorations):
assert 'label' not in decorations
decorations['label'] = self.label
return self.base.collect_decorations(decorations)
def __getattr__(self, attribute):
return self.base.__getattr(attribute)
Is this a clean approach? Am I missing something?
I am mostly confused, because I can solve this - with longer class names - using cooperative multiple inheritance:
class Transition(object):
def __init__(self, **kwargs):
# init is pythons MI-madness ;-)
super(Transition, self).__init__(**kwargs)
self.start = kwargs['start']
self.end = kwargs['end']
def get_label(self):
return None
def get_condition(self):
return None
def __eq__(self, other):
try:
return self.start == other.start and self.end == other.end
except AttributeError:
return False
class LabeledTransition(Transition):
def __init__(self, **kwargs):
super(LabeledTransition).__init__(**kwargs)
self.label = kwargs['label']
def get_label(self):
return self.label
def __eq__(self):
super_result = super(LabeledTransition, self).__eq__(other)
try:
return super_result and self.label == other.label
except AttributeError:
return False
class ConditionalTransition(Transition):
def __init__(self, **kwargs):
super(ConditionalTransition, self).__init__(**kwargs)
self.condition = kwargs['condition']
def get_condition(self):
return self.condition
def __eq__(self, other):
super_result = super(ConditionalTransition, self).__eq__(other)
try:
return super_result and self.condition = other.condition
except AttributeError:
return False
# ConditionalTransition about the same, with get_condition
class LabeledConditionalTransition(LabeledTransition, ConditionalTransition):
pass
the class LabledConditionalTransition behaves exactly as expected - and having no code in there is appealing and I do not thing MI is confusing at this size.
Of course, the third option would be to just hammer everything into a single transition class with a bunch of in has_label/has_transition.
So... I am confused. Am I missing something? Which implementation looks better? How do you handle similar cases, that is, objects which look like a Decorator could handle them, but then, such a non-local method comes around?
EDIT: Added the ConditionalTransition-class. Basically, this kinda behaves like the decorator, minus the order created by the order of creating the decorators, the transition checks for start and end being correct, the LabeledTransition-class checks for label being correct and ConditionalTransition checks for condition being correct.
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