promoting [] by superclass?

[Robert Brewer]

Jim Newton wrote:
> this is interesting.  I though that if you passed
> an argument to your class factory function, it would call
> the __init__ with that argument.
> 
> class x1(list):
>    def __init__(y):
>       pass
> 
> class x2(list):
>    pass
> 
> what does x1([]) do and what does x2([]) do?

x1([]) first calls x1.__new__, but since you're not overriding that, it
moves up the class heirarchy to the next superclass, which is 'list',
and calls list.__new__(cls, sequence). Notice that there are two
arguments to this method. That method is written in such a way that the
result is of type 'cls' (in your example, cls == x1). So when this
method returns, we've got an object of type 'x1'.

Then x1.__init__ gets called, passing it the new object and the
'sequence' arg. However, you've overridden list.__init__; moreover, it
doesn't have the same number of arguments as __new__ did, so you get a
TypeError saying that __init__ takes a different number of arguments. If
you want to override __init__, it should be written:

>>> class x1(list):
... 	def __init__(self, sequence):
... 		pass
... 	
>>> x1([])
[]
>>> type(x1([]))
<class '__main__.x1'>

Now, that only works if you wish to keep the same signature (arguments).
If you want to provide another argument to the class instantiation, you
need to override both __new__ and __init__ so that their argument lists
"match":

>>> class x1(list):
... 	def __new__(cls, sequence=[], maxlen=5):
... 		return list.__new__(cls, sequence)
... 	def __init__(self, sequence=[], maxlen=5):
... 		self.maxlen = maxlen
... 		
>>> x1([])
[]
>>> type(x1([]))
<class '__main__.x1'>
>>> x1([], 7)
[]
>>> x1([], 7).maxlen
7

x2 doesn't override anything, so the default list.* methods get called
for all operations. Remember, though, that list.__new__ produces an
object whose type is the subclass automatically, without overriding;
therefore:

>>> class x2(list): pass
... 
>>> type(x2([]))
<class '__main__.x2'>


Hope that helps!

Robert Brewer
MIS
Amor Ministries
fumanchu at amor.org