Pattern matching function declarations in Python part II

Ok, so the pattern matching idea kind of backfired.

I was under the impression that a function's default arguments wouldn't be evaluated until the function was called. Which would have meant that I could've changed them, into valid Python code, in the decorator function. But... that's not the way it works.

My first attempt at something more interesting than matching a constant failed miserably. I wanted to use a variable to constrain that matching process. For example:

>>> @patternmatched
... def foo(lst = [__, var, var, __]):
...   pass

should match any lst which is a list and where there is, at least one, repeated element somewhere in it. Both [1,1,2,3,4] and [3,2,1,1,2] should match, whilst [1,2,1,3,1] shouldn't.

Unfortunately. Trying the above results in a NameError since both __ and var are unbound. And, seeing that, I remembered that this is *exactly* what happened about three years ago when I was trying out various syntaxes for PyRete. It's the reason I decided to put all of the matching in the if-statement instead of in the function arguments.

But, it's not quite time yet to give up. There are several possible ways to go about this. The "best" choice is probably to use Andrew's python4ply, or maybe PyPy. Either way, I'll get a chance to compare and contrast the work of implementing a DSL in Python versus Common Lisp.