vbgunz enlightened us with: > I hope I've made some sense with this question. I ultimately wish to > know just one real thing. Regardless of the name of the second > example above, what is the purpose of calling a sub class method > from a super class instance? What is the application to such a > design?
I've seen this style of programming before, in wxWidgets. The constructor of a class does various things. This is roughly what happens: class wxSomeClass(wxParent): def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): # Do various things if not self.OnInit(): raise RuntimeError("Initialization failed") # Do other things that need to be done after custom # initialization def OnInit(self): return True This makes it easier to simply provide custom initialization, without having to redo everything in __init__. Calling the superclass' function is fine if you want to add behaviour before and/or after calling it. This example however lets you customize behaviour that's put in the middle of the __init__ function. > Maybe an example will help? I hope so :) Sybren -- The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? Frank Zappa -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list