Apparently Guido fell in love with generic functions, so (possibly) in future Python versions you will be able to solve dispatching problems in in an industrial strenght way. Sometimes however the simplest possible way is enough, and you can use something like this :
class SimpleDispatcher(object): """A dispatcher is a callable object that looks in a "namespace" for callable objects and calls them with the signature ``<dispatcher>(<callablename>, <dispatchtag>, <*args>, <**kw>)`` The "namespace" can be a module, a class, a dictionary, or anything that responds to ``getattr`` or (alternatively) to ``__getitem__``. Here is an example of usage: >>> call = SimpleDispatcher(globals()) >>> def manager_showpage(): ... return 'Manager' >>> def member_showpage(): ... return 'Member' >>> def anonymous_showpage(): ... return 'Anonymous' >>> call('showpage', 'anonymous') 'Anonymous' >>> call('showpage', 'manager') 'Manager' >>> call('showpage', 'member') 'Member' """ def __init__(self, ns): self._ns = ns def __call__(self, funcname, classname, *args, **kw): try: func = getattr(self._ns, '%s_%s' % (classname, funcname)) except AttributeError: func = self._ns['%s_%s' % (class -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list