Passing expressions to functions?

Question

I\'m not quite sure what I mean here, so please bear with me..

In SQLAlchemy, it appears I\'m supposed to pass an expression to filter() in certain cases. When I try to

Answer 1

You can achieve your example if you make "op" a function:

>>> def magic(left, op, right):
...     return op(left, right)
...
>>> magic(5, (lambda a, b: a == b), 5)
True
>>> magic(5, (lambda a, b: a == b), 4)
False

This is more Pythonic than passing a string. It's how functions like sort() work.

Those SQLAlchemy examples with filter() are puzzling. I don't know the internals about SQLAlchemy, but I'm guessing in an example like query.filter(User.name == 'ed') what's going on is that User.name is a SQLAlchemy-specific type, with an odd implementation of the __eq() function that generates SQL for the filter() function instead of doing a comparison. Ie: they've made special classes that let you type Python expressions that emit SQL code. It's an unusual technique, one I'd avoid unless building something that's bridging two languages like an ORM.