Can I inherit member variables?

[lm401 at cam.ac.uk]

I'm trying to work with the following idea:

class animal:
  def __init__(self, weight, colour):
    self.weight = weight
    self.colour = colour


class bird(animal):
  def __init__(self, wingspan):
    self.wingspan = wingspan
    print self.weight, self.colour, self.wingspan

class fish(animal):
  def __init__(self, length):
    self.length = length
    print self.weight, self.colour, self.length


So basically I have a base class (animal) that has certain attributes.
When animal is inherited by a specific instance, further attributes are
added, but I need to have access to the original attributes (weight,
colour). When I run my code from within the derived class, self.weight
and self.colour are not  inherited (although methods are inherited as I
would have expected).

It seems from reading the newsgroups that a solution might be to
declare weight and colour as global variables in the class animal:

class animal:
  pass

myanimal = animal()
myanimal.weight = 4
myanimal.colour = 'blue'

But this is not exactly what I want to do.

I'm not very experienced with OOP techniques, so perhaps what I'm
trying to do is not sensible. Does Python differ with regard to
inheritance of member variables from C++ and Java?

Thanks for any help,



 Lorcan.