__init__ is the initialiser

[Mark Lawrence]

On 01/02/2014 14:40, Roy Smith wrote:
> In article <mailman.6275.1391257695.18130.python-list at python.org>,
>   Ned Batchelder <ned at nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
>
>> The existence of __new__ is an
>> advanced topic that many programmers never encounter.  Taking a quick
>> scan through some large projects (Django, edX, SQLAlchemy, mako), the
>> ratio of __new__ implementations to __init__ implementations ranges from
>> 0% to 1.5%, which falls into "rare" territory for me.
>
>  From our own codebase:
>
> $ find . -name '*.py' | xargs grep 'def.*__new__' | wc -l
> 1
> $ find . -name '*.py' | xargs grep 'def.*__init__' | wc -l
> 228
>
> Doing the same searches over all the .py files in our virtualenv, I get
> 2830 (__init__) vs. 50 (__new__).
>

You could remove all 228 __init__ and still get your code to work by 
scattering object attributes anywhere you like, something I believe you 
can't do in C++/Java.  I doubt that you could remove the single __new__ 
and get your code to work.

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask 
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence