> I was just wondering, what magic can you do with classes? You can define your own types. Thats what classes are for. Those types can be as 'magic' as your imagination (and programming skills!) allow.
> other classes are interesting to subclass? I've seen Object too, but I > don't understand what it does. It's 'object' - lowercase o - and that is the way to tell Python to use "new-style" classes, which are not very new now! Essentially all the basic types in Python are descended from object and the object class provides access to some special features that won't be available if you don't subclass object (as in classic style classes) OTOH subclsassing object does add overhead to your class and so makes it a bit slower. You can also subclass any other Python type, thus class bigfloat(float): .... would provide a special type of floating point number - maybe with unlimited precision, provided you wrote the code to allow that... Finally classes are themselves objects and can be used as a way of monitoring and controlling a collection of objects. This is often called meta-programming and if you want to twist your head in knots read the paper that Guido wrote on meta programming in Python :-) Read the OOP topic in my tutorial for more about using classes. (but not about meta programming!! :-) Alan G Author of the Learn to Program web tutor http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
