derived / base class name conflicts

[christopherlmarshall at yahoo.com]

Suppose you want to write a subclass of some existing class you are
importing from a module you didn't write and that you don't want to
study the internals of, and you want to define a data member i in your
constructor.

As in the following:

from module1 import A

class B(A):
   def __init__(self):
      A.__init__(self)
      self.i= 0
b= B()

Now, 'i' might have already been defined by A or by the call to
A.__init__() so if you define it without knowing that, you could be
changing the behavior of A's methods in unknown ways, which is
obviously a bad thing.

One way to avoid this is to run the following program to clear the name
'i' first:

from module1 import A
a= A()
print a.i

If you get an AttributeError, you know the name 'i' is safe to use.  If
you actually get some sort of report from the print statement, then you
will know that 'i' is not safe to use.

This strikes me as a rather odd procedure to go through, but I don't
see any way around it.

It there some other way to handle this issue?

Do I actually need to study the sources for / implementation of
Tkinter.Canvas before I can safely subclass it (and assign attributes
to an instance of the subclass) or clear attribute names as I outlined
above?

Chris Marshall