changing how instances are "created"

[John Roth]

"newseater" <kbilsted at hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1118617483.215438.318980 at o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
> Hello. I need to be able to control how objects are created. Sometimes
> when creating an object, i want to reuse another object instead. I've
> searched for factory method implementations and singleton
> implementations. They were too much of a hack!
>
> My first attempt of doing this was to play around with the __new__()
> method. But i didn't quite succed. Then i came up with making a static
> method which can create my instances or re-use other instances.
> However, the below code I cannot get to work :(
>
> class Creator
> def createInstance(cls, *args, **kwargs):
> anewinstance = cls.__new__(cls, *args, **kwargs)
> anewinstance.__init__(*args, **kwargs)
>
> return anewinstance
> createInstance = staticmethod(createInstance)
>
>
> can anyone help??

__new__ is the proper way to do this, but making it work
is a bit tricky. If you could post the code you tried to
get to work for __new__(), we could critique it.

The current documentation is in 3.3.1 of the Python
Reference Manual (Python 2.4 version). In earlier
versions, there were a couple of other documents
that did a better (IMO) job of explaining things.

The trick is that __new__ must return an instance.
It can be a newly created instance (and the doc shows
how to do this) or an existing instance of any new style
class.

By the way - when you post code, please use spaces
for indentation. There are a number of popular mail
clients that don't play fair with tabs, and people using
these clients will frequently ignore code that isn't
properly indented.

John Roth