On 2007-12-05, Bruno Desthuilliers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : >> Is it possible to find out if an object is of a certain type >> or of a type derived from this type? > > You have the answer, thanks to Diez and Christian. Now unless > you have a *very* compelling reason to check the type of an > object, *just forget about it*. 9 times out of 10, this is > fighting against the language's type system (hint: google for > "duck typing").
As I understand Python practice (and this is pretty limited, so corrections or other use cases are welcome), type checking is useful for overloading functions by argument type, e.g., __getitem__, which accepts both integers and slice objects as keys for sequence types. Although in the case of __getitem__, et al, it seems like the key type could have been unified to slices (except I suppose the return type also change, er... except for strings--oh never mind). -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
