On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:35:52 -0400, wheres pythonmonks wrote: > Thanks ... I thought int was a type-cast (like in C++) so I assumed I > couldn't reference it.
Python doesn't have type-casts in the sense of "tell the compiler to treat object of type A as type B instead". The closest Python has to that is that if you have an instance of class A, you can do this: a = A() # make an instance of class A a.__class__ = B # tell it that it's now class B and hope that it won't explode when you try to use it :/ I make that seem like a dangerous thing to do, but it's not really. There actually are sensible use-cases for such a thing, you can't do it to built-ins (which would be dangerous!), and the worst that will happen with classes written in Python is they'll raise an exception when you try calling a method, rather than dump core. Otherwise, all type conversions in Python create a new instance of the new type, and the conversion functions themselves (int, str, etc.) are actual type objects which you can pass around to functions: >>> type(int) <type 'type'> Calling int(x) calls the int constructor with argument x, and returns a new int object. (In the *specific* case of int, it will sometimes cache small integers and re-use the same one multiple times, but don't count on that behaviour since it's an implementation-specific optimization.) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
