one-time initialization of class members

[Larry Bates]

James Turk wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a situation where I have some class members that should only be
> done once.  Essentially my problem looks like this:
> 
> class Base(object):
>     dataset = None
> 
>     def __init__(self, param):
>         if type(self).dataset is None:
>             # code to load dataset based on param, expensive
> 
> class ChildClass1(Base):
>     def __init__(self):
>         Base.__init__(self, data_params)
> 
> class AnotherChildClass(Base):
>     def __init__(self):
>         Base.__init__(self, other_data_params)
> 
> 
> This seems to work, initialization is only done at the first creation
> of either class.  I was just wondering if this is the 'pythonic' way
> to do this as my solution does feel a bit hackish.
> 
I could be missing something but dataset is shared among all the class
instances.  If you reset it based on param it will be reset every time
you create a new instance of the Base class with a different param.  Is
that really what you want to do?  If so just use:

class Base(object):
    dataset = None

    def __init__(self, param):
        if self.dataset is None:
            # code to load dataset based on param, expensive


-Larry