In Python, make a variable act like a function, call a function without parentheses, alias a function as a variable, etc?

Question

I am working with slightly modifying someone else's code for my needs and want to replace what is currently a fixed variable with a function. But adding a () to each time the variable is referenced later to get the value is simply not feasible in this situation, or would not be worth the amount of work required. I need a way to define a variable as a function such that while it is referenced as a variable in all further code, it actually checks what the value should be each time it is queried as if I had added parentheses to each reference. I do not care how this is achieved, but it should not require any changes to the code that references the former-variable.

The function in this case is random.random(). I want to make a variable always have a random value within a certain range whenever checked, WITHOUT adding parentheses to each and every time the variable is referenced. Is there any way to do this? I know I'm not giving a whole lot of information about context here, but in this case the whole point is that no knowledge or adjustment of any of the other code should be required.

Answer 1

You could maybe get there with a class with a property.

import random as r

class AlwaysRandom:
  @property
  def random(self):
    return r.random()

Then create an instance and assign it to the name random in your namespace:

random = AlwaysRandom()

Now, any time you assign random, you assign a return value from r.random():

>>> random.random
0.1993064343052221
>>> random.random
0.9121594527461093
>>> [random.random for _ in range(5)]
[0.0800719907184344, 0.14744257667766358, 0.5809572562744559, 0.337413501046831, 0.52033363367589]