instance creation

[Paul MG]

Hi

I am dabbling with Python and have run into a bit of an oddness. I
have a class Appointment, with fields Title and Details. I want to
allow two means of construction:

1) Providing Title and Details strings explicitly, to create a new
instance.
2) Providing an ID, which causes that Appointment to be loaded from a
backing store.

Now in C++ or smalltalk, I would do one of

- Provide two constructors:

    def __init__(self, name, details):
      self.name = name
      self.details = details

    def __init__(self, id):
      load(id)

    def load(self, id):
      i = open("appointment"+str(id))
      self = pickle.load(i)

- Provide a class method (creation method) to instantiate:

    def create(id):
      i = open("appointment"+str(id))
      return pickle.load(i)

However, much of this seems not to work.

- Having two constructors seems to be illegal - or at least the second
overwrites the first.
- Assigning to 'self' in the load method seems to really not work!
- Putting the create() method outside of the class works fine - but I
want it to be a class method on Appointment, goddammit!:) Is there no
way to do this?

Any help would be appreciated, basically i am looking for the python
idiom to do this, as my C++ and Smalltalk idiom's clearly aren't in
the grain of the language!

Thanks very much
Paul MG