How to trigger function on value change?

You need to use the Observer Pattern. In the following code, a person subscribes to receive updates from the global wealth entity. When there is a change to global wealth, this entity then alerts all its subscribers (observers) that a change happened. Person then updates itself.

I make use of properties in this example, but they are not necessary. A small warning: properties work only on new style classes, so the (object) after the class declarations are mandatory for this to work.

class GlobalWealth(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self._global_wealth = 10.0
        self._observers = []

    @property
    def global_wealth(self):
        return self._global_wealth

    @global_wealth.setter
    def global_wealth(self, value):
        self._global_wealth = value
        for callback in self._observers:
            print('announcing change')
            callback(self._global_wealth)

    def bind_to(self, callback):
        print('bound')
        self._observers.append(callback)


class Person(object):
    def __init__(self, data):
        self.wealth = 1.0
        self.data = data
        self.data.bind_to(self.update_how_happy)
        self.happiness = self.wealth / self.data.global_wealth

    def update_how_happy(self, global_wealth):
        self.happiness = self.wealth / global_wealth


if __name__ == '__main__':
    data = GlobalWealth()
    p = Person(data)
    print(p.happiness)
    data.global_wealth = 1.0
    print(p.happiness)

You can use properties if you want to execute code when attributes are changed. Be wary that big side-effects or significant overhead occurring when an attribute is changed is a little bit surprising to anyone using your API, so in some cases you probably want to avoid it by using methods instead.

class A(object):

    def m(self, p_value):
         print p_value

    @property
    def p(self):
        return self._p 

    @p.setter
    def p(self, value)
        self._p = value
        self.m(value)

What are you looking for is called (Functional) Reactive Programming. For Common Lisp there is Cells – see Cells project and Cells manifesto and for python there is the Trellis library.

Spreadsheets also use the same paradigm. Very useful for keeping track of multiple interrelated parameters – like in GUI programming for example.

Reactive programming is similar to the Observer pattern, but with an important distinction:

Similarities with Observer pattern However, integrating the data flow concepts into the programming language would make it easier to express them, and could therefore increase the granularity of the data flow graph. For example, the observer pattern commonly describes data-flows between whole objects/classes, whereas object-oriented reactive programming could target the members of objects/classes.

How to trigger function on value change?

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