instance attributes not inherited?

[John M. Gabriele]

David Hirschfield wrote:
> Nothing's wrong with python's oop inheritance, you just need to know 
> that the parent class' __init__ is not automatically called from a 
> subclass' __init__. Just change your code to do that step, and you'll be 
> fine:
> 
> class Parent( object ):
>     def __init__( self ):
>         self.x = 9
> 
> 
> class Child( Parent ):
>     def __init__( self ):
>     super(Child,self).__init__()
>        print "Inside Child.__init__()"
> 
> -David
> 

How does it help that Parent.__init__ gets called? That call simply
would create a temporary Parent object, right? I don't see how it
should help (even though it *does* indeed work).

Why do we need to pass self along in that call to super()? Shouldn't
the class name be enough for super() to find the right superclass object?