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Theabacus module is an example of module metaprogrammingin service of developer experience.

The end-user APIs forplain_abacus andabacus are the same.Please view their module-level docstrings for examples.

Butabacus uses metaprogramming to elliminate the codeduplication in theadd andsub functions ofplain_abacus.

The metaprogramming features are:

• @command: decorator to register a method name as a command;
• @command_alias: decorator to register a method name and aliases as a command;
• _make_command: builds a stand-alone function from anAbacus method;
• _install_commands: makes commands and installs them as global functions;

Note:abacus has more lines of code and is much harder to understand thanplain_abacus.However, this example was inspired by thejupyturtle project,where theTurtle class has many more methods thanAbacus,therefore coding each global function by hand would requirea lot of duplication and many more lines of code.

When using metaprogramming, it's always a good idea to considerwhether the added complexity is worthwhile.