8.2 Dataclasses

Since Python 3.7, dataclasses let us define ordinary objects with a clean syntax for specifying attributes. They look – superficially – very similar to named tuples. This is a pleasant approach that makes it easy to understand how they work. For more details, see Modern Python Cookbook, Chapter 7 for recipes related to dataclasses.

Here’s a dataclass version of our Stock example:

from decimal import Decimal 
from dataclasses import dataclass 
 
 
@dataclass 
class Stock: 
    symbol: str 
    current: Decimal 
    high: Decimal 
    low: Decimal

For this case, the definition is nearly identical to the NamedTuple definition.

The @dataclass decorator transforms the given code into a more complete class. We encountered decorators in  Chapter 6. We’ll dig into them deeply in  Chapter 11.

As with NamedTuple, it’...