Python __call__ special method practical example

Question

I know that __call__ method in a class is triggered when the instance of a class is called. However, I have no idea when I can use this special method, because

Answer 1

Yes, when you know you're dealing with objects, it's perfectly possible (and in many cases advisable) to use an explicit method call. However, sometimes you deal with code that expects callable objects - typically functions, but thanks to __call__ you can build more complex objects, with instance data and more methods to delegate repetitive tasks, etc. that are still callable.

Also, sometimes you're using both objects for complex tasks (where it makes sense to write a dedicated class) and objects for simple tasks (that already exist in functions, or are more easily written as functions). To have a common interface, you either have to write tiny classes wrapping those functions with the expected interface, or you keep the functions functions and make the more complex objects callable. Let's take threads as example. The Thread objects from the standard libary module threading want a callable as target argument (i.e. as action to be done in the new thread). With a callable object, you are not restricted to functions, you can pass other objects as well, such as a relatively complex worker that gets tasks to do from other threads and executes them sequentially:

class Worker(object):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.queue = queue.Queue()
        self.args = args
        self.kwargs = kwargs

    def add_task(self, task):
        self.queue.put(task)

    def __call__(self):
        while True:
            next_action = self.queue.get()
            success = next_action(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
            if not success:
               self.add_task(next_action)

This is just an example off the top of my head, but I think it is already complex enough to warrant the class. Doing this only with functions is hard, at least it requires returning two functions and that's slowly getting complex. One could rename __call__ to something else and pass a bound method, but that makes the code creating the thread slightly less obvious, and doesn't add any value.