mutable member, bug or ...

[Sambo]

By accident I assigned int to a class member 'count' which was initialized to (empty) string and had no error till I tried to use it as string, obviously. Why was there no error on assignment( near the end ). 


class Cgroup_info:
    group_name = ""
    count = "0"  #last time checked and processed/retrieved
    first = "0"
    last = ""
    retrieval_type = ""        # allways , ask( if more than some limit), none
    date_checked = ""
    time_checked = ""
    new_count = ""
    new_first = ""
    new_last = ""
# local storage maintanance vars
    pointer_file = ""
    message_file = ""
#maintanance vars    
    cur_mess_num = 0
    cur_mess_id = ""

    def __init__( self ):
        group_name = ""
        count = "0"  #last time checked and processed/retrieved

    def get_count( self ):
        print self.count, type( self.count )
        return string.atoi( self.count, 10 )

class server_info:
    def "(server_info::)"get_group_stat( self, grp ):
        
        gr_info = Cgroup_info()
        gr_info.group_name = grp
        try:
            ind = self.group_list.index( grp )
        except ValueError:
            gr_info.count(0)
            return ( gr_info )
        print ind
        if len( self.group_list[ind].split() ) == 4:
            gr_info.count = self.group_list[ind].split()[1]
            gr_info.first = self.group_list[ind].split()[2]        
            gr_info.last = self.group_list[ind].split()[3]        
        else:
            gr_info.count = gr_info.first = gr_info.last = "0"
        return( gr_info )