Does a syntax for this exist? In any language?

Posted by Michael on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Michael
Published on 2010-05-28T03:58:09Z Indexed on 2010/05/28 4:01 UTC
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It seems pretty common to me to have an argument, in a dynamically typed language that is either an Object or a key to lookup that object. For instance when I'm working with a database I might have a method getMyRelatedStuff(person)

All I really need to lookup the related stuff is the id of the person so my method could look like this in python:

def getMyRelatedStuff(person_or_id):
    id = person_or_id.id if isinstance(person,User) else person_or_id
    #do some lookup

Or going the other direction:

def someFileStuff(file_or_name):
    file = file_or_name if hasattr(file,'write') else open(file_or_name)

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