In terms of the implementation, it's kind of trivial to implement the "magic", but it would be both confusing and inconsistent, see below. e.g. imagine a case

In terms of the implementation, it's kind of trivial to implement the "magic", but it would be both confusing and inconsistent, see below. e.g. imagine a case where you'd want to call datetime.strptime, partially initializing it at the moment of conversion definition. at the moment it is: c.call_func( datetime.strptime, c.item("updated"), "%Y-%m-%d" ) but it's unclear to me how would the "magic" approach deal with the case above.