Well, Seo Sanghyeon asked me a pretty reasonable question of the last entry



"Why don't you use help(), instead of printing Overloads?"



Good question, I didn't realise that actually worked in IronPython for .Net types, I was very pleasantly surprised, I remember in the early betas i tried using help() on various managed types and it would just raise a NotImplementedException exception (or something like that, I forget now) - so what does that mean for my examples... well... let's take a system type like Guid and use help() on it.



IronPython 1.0.60816 on .NET 2.0.50727.42
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

>>> import System

>>> from System import *

>>> help(Guid)

Help on Guid in module System in mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089



 |      Guid(Array[Byte] b)

 |      Guid(UInt32 a, UInt16 b,
UInt16 c, Byte d, Byte e, Byte f, Byte g, Byteh, Byte i, Byte j,
Byte k)

 |      Guid(str g)

 |      Guid(int a, Int16 b, Int16
c, Array[Byte] d)

 |      Guid(int a, Int16 b, Int16
c, Byte d, Byte e, Byte f, Byte g, Byte h, Byte i, Byte j, Byte
k)

 |      Guid
CreateInstance[Guid]()

 |

 |  Data and other attributes defined here:

 |

 |      CompareTo(...)

 |             
int CompareTo(self, object value)

 |             
int CompareTo(self, Guid value)

 |      Equals(...)

 |             
bool Equals(self, object o)

 |             
bool Equals(self, Guid g)

 |      Finalize(...)

 |             
Finalize(self)

 |      GetHashCode(...)

 |             
int GetHashCode(self)

 |      GetType(...)

 |             
Type GetType(self)

 |      MemberwiseClone(...)

 |             
object MemberwiseClone(self)

 |      NewGuid(...)

 |             
Guid NewGuid()

 |      ToByteArray(...)

 |             
Array[Byte] ToByteArray(self)

 |      ToString(...)

 |             
str ToString(self)

 |             
str ToString(self, str format)

 |             
str ToString(self, str format, IFormatProvider provider)

 |      __eq__(...)

 |             
bool op_Equality(Guid a, Guid b)

 |      __init__(...)

 |             
x.__init__(...) initializes x; see x.__class__.__doc__ for
signature

 |             
x.__init__(...) initializes x; see x.__class__.__doc__ for
signature

 |      __ne__(...)

 |             
bool op_Inequality(Guid a, Guid b)

 |      __new__(...)

 |             
__new__(cls, Array[Byte] b)

 |             
__new__(cls, UInt32 a, UInt16 b, UInt16 c, Byte d, Byte e, Bytef,
Byte g, Byte h, Byte i, Byte j, Byte k)

 |             
__new__(cls, str g)

 |             
__new__(cls, int a, Int16 b, Int16 c, Array[Byte] d)

 |             
__new__(cls, int a, Int16 b, Int16 c, Byte d, Byte e, Byte f,
Byte g, Byte h, Byte i, Byte j, Byte k)

 |             
Guid CreateInstance[Guid]()

 |



>>>


Sweet, it works a treat - and will save a lot of digging time - though you might want to capture the results for big classes ;o)



Thanks Seo!



(btw, Seo is the man behind the Iron Python Community Edition & FePy projects - which can be found on sourceforge) and I would have to agree with this article that he does seem almost OmniPresent in the IronPython community...