interactive help on the base object

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 1:41 PM, Mark Janssen <dreamingforward at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> What methods, if any does it provide?  Are they all abstract? etc???
>>
>> Pretty much nothing useful :-)
>>
>> py> dir(object)
>> [...]
>>
>
> So (prodding the student), Why does everything inherit from Object if
> it provides no functionality?
>
> Practicality-beats-purity-yours?

Nothing useful to call directly. An int has some useful methods in Python:

>>> (258).to_bytes(2,"little")
b'\x02\x01'

So does a list:

>>> [1,4,1,5,9].count(1)
2

But there's nothing you'd normally want to call from object itself
(except maybe __repr__). There *are*, however, important pieces of
default functionality. Steven mentioned __eq__, and there's also its
pair __hash__. The default system works because the root type provides
implementations of those two functions:

>>> a = object()
>>> b = object()
>>> a == b
False
>>> d = {a:"A", b:"B"}
>>> d[a]
'A'

And it's important that these sorts of things work, because otherwise
a simple Python class would look like this:

class Foo:
    def __new__(self): pass
    def __init__(self): pass
    def __hash__(self): return id(self)
    def __eq__(self, other): return self is other
    # ...

This repetition is exactly what inheritance is good at solving.
Therefore putting that functionality into a base class makes sense;
and since everything MUST have these functions to be able to be used
plausibly, putting them in the lowest base class of all makes the most
sense.

ChrisA