What is a class?

[Paul McGuire]

On Mar 5, 2:04 pm, castiro... at gmail.com wrote:
> On Mar 5, 1:29 pm, Paul McGuire <pt... at austin.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mar 5, 12:50 pm, castiro... at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > > What is a class that is not a module?
>
> > Please stop posting these one-liner beginner questions.  If you can
> > type it in one line, you can enter it on the Google.com or Ask.com
> > query page and get a wealth of *existing* information, from tutorials,
> > documentation, online presentations.  If you are able to phrase such a
> > question, you are capable of doing a little research and
> > experimentation on your own.
>
> > These posts translate to "I'm too lazy to use Google, or too cheap to
> > buy a Python book, or too lazy to read it, or too impatient to do my
> > own experimenting - much better to just post on c.l.py and have the
> > answer spoon-fed to me!"
>
> > I refuse to spoon feed you the answer to this question when plenty of
> > supporting material is already available.
>
> In the future, shall I assume that other readers here have no ideas
> (on this, read *ever*), that haven't already been published?  'Cause I
> have.
>
> For instance, in this example, I've tried a few approaches that didn't
> turn out well.
>
Fair game.  Capture one of these classes (or better, distill it down
to a *small* example demonstrating the problem), tell us what you are
trying to achieve, post it, AND tell us what is "not turning out
well."  (Your previous posts have done a poor job in providing one or
more of these elements.)

> Do you want a comparison of existing solutions?  Do you have a proof
> that they exhaust the solution space?
>
*I* don't want *any* such thing, especially on the topics of "what is
a class?" and "how is a class different from a module?", nor do I need
proof that the basic background info on this topic covers the
mainstream applications of classes and modules.  These are basic OO
concepts in Python.  Try googling "python object-oriented".  And if
there were some esoteric aspect of "what is a class?" that you want to
pursue that might not be covered in the available material, I would
expect one to include that in the original post.

> I'm willing to address convention, in serial or parallel--- (change
> subject to 'what goes on newsgroups'?), but it's not clear from fact
> what assumption who has made.
>
Since you did not elaborate on what your efforts were and the extent
they were undesirable (certainly useful info from someone honestly
interested in a helpful answer), I assumed you had made none.

> Next time, why don't you say, "How much experience do you have?", or
> "What level should I gear my answer toward?"
>
I put the onus on the poster to realize that the question they are
asking is in fact a basic concept, *especially* when the subject of
the question is captured in a built-in method, type, class, or
keyword.  Surely you are aware that Python has been around for a
number of years, and that in all that time, it is entirely likely that
the topic of "what is a class?" has been covered, in any number of the
tutorials and docs so charitably written by many of the contributors
in this newsgroup.

Please stop asking those people to further expend their time repeating
this work just for your benefit.  It is like arriving late to a
meeting, and asking everyone to stop and bring you up to speed on what
you missed, in effect saying, "My time is more valuable than yours, I
can't be bothered to arrive on time, or do even the simplest research
for myself."

-- Paul