Can you create an instance of a subclass with an existing instance of the base class?

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In article <444d4b92$0$7905$636a55ce at news.free.fr>,
 Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.quelquechose at free.quelquepart.fr> wrote:

>Sandra-24 a écrit :
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> 
>>>In article <1145736124.831082.34550 at v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com>,
>>> "Sandra-24" <sandravandale at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Now that is a clever little trick. I never would have guessed you can
>>>>assign to __class__, Python always surprises me in it's sheer
>>>>flexibility.
>>>
>>>That's because you're still thinking in OO terms. 
>> 
>> It's not quite as simple as all that. I agree that people, escpecially
>> people with a Java (ew) background overuse OO, when there's often
>> simpler ways of doing things.
>
>Nope. I mean : they don't overuse OO, they overuse *classes*. AFAIK, OO 
>means *object* oriented - not class oriented.

Oh great. Now we have someone redefining the concept of OO to evade the 
point I was making.

>There are OO languages that don't even have a notion of class.

Sounds like stuff I was doing in C (a non-OO language) years ago. Unless 
you want to count C as an OO language, I think you're going to have to 
retract this claim.

>> However in this case I'm simply getting an object (an mp_request object
>> from mod_python) passed into my function, and before I pass it on to
>> the functions that make up and individual web page it is modified by
>> adding members and methods to add functionality.
>
>Which is a well-known design pattern called "decorator".

If you have to think of it as a design pattern, that means you haven't 
figured out the code reuse angle yet.