Multiple inheritance, super() and changing signature

[Ian Kelly]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 11:36 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Jun 2016 06:22 pm, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, June 1, 2016 at 8:02:14 AM UTC+12, Ben Finney wrote:
>>> (Note that ‘__init__’ is not a constructor, because it operates on the
>>> *already constructed* instance, and does not return anything.
>>
>> Believe it or not, that *is* what “constructor” means in every OO
>> language.
>
> I don't believe it.
>
> C# is an OO language, and it distinguishes constructors and initialisers:
>
> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397680.aspx
>
> (although they don't seem to mean quite the same as what they mean in
> Python).

Indeed. The "constructor" in that example is the equivalent of the
Python __init__ method. The "initializer" is not a part of the class
at all but just a syntactic sugar for creating an instance and setting
some of its properties at the same time in a single statement. It's
very similar to the C array initializer syntax, e.g.:

    int myArray[] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};