Introduction to Meta-Programming

Learn about meta-programming and type() function in this lesson.

What is meta-programming?

The potential of a code to be able to manipulate itself is called meta-programming. Sounds mystical, right?

In Pythonic terms, creating functions and classes to manipulate code by modifying the existing code, or generating code is meta-programming.

As far as meta-programming via functions is concerned, we had already covered it when we discussed decorators in the first half of the course. Python also supports meta-programming for classes by introducing meta-classes.

Type of an object

In Python, everything has a type. You can check the type by using the built-in function type(). When we create an integer variable, we are creating an object of int class. The same goes for any custom class:

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