What is the semantics meaning of 'object'?

[Mark Janssen]

> This bothers me as well.  If you look at Raymond Hettinger's "super()
> considered super" article, he includes the (correct) advice that
> super() needs to be used at every level of the call chain.  At the end
> of the article, he offers this example to show how "easy" multiple
> inheritance can be:
> [...]
> oc = OrderedCounter('abracadabra')
>
> Which is pretty cool in its simplicity, but here's the rub (which I
> have previously noted on this list): OrderedDict doesn't use super.
> Counter does, but not cooperatively; it just calls super().__init__()
> with no arguments.  So the fact that this example works at all is
> basically luck.

Ah, and here we see the weakness in the object architecture that has
evolved in the past decade (not just in Python, note).  It hasn't
really ironed out what end is what.   Here's a proposal:  the highest,
most "parental", most general object should be in charge, not
subclasses calling specific parent's init methods
(Parent.__init__(myparams)), etc. -- ***THIS IS WHERE WE WENT
WRONG***.

After the "type/class unification", python tried to make the most
generic, most useless class be the parent of *all of them*, but
there's been no use whatsoever in that.  It was a good idea in the
beginning, so pure as it was, but it has not panned out in practice.
Sorry...

I'm trying to start a recovery plan at the wikiwikiweb
(http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb) and I don't want to hear any more
smarmy comments about it.  The confusion is deeper than Python.
-- 
MarkJ
Tacoma, Washington