what exactly does type.__call__ do?

[Jason Maldonis]

Hi everyone,

I want to use a metaclass to override how class instantiation works. I've
done something analogous to using the Singleton metaclass from the Python3
Cookbook example.

However, I want to provide a classmethod that allows for "normal" class
instantiation that prevents this metaclass from being used.

To do that, I think I just make a @classmethod constructor function.
However, I can imagine a few different ways of writing this:

@classmethod
def normal_constructor(cls, *args, **kwargs):
    return type.__call__(*args, **kwargs)

@classmethod
def normal_constructor(cls, *args, **kwargs):
    return super(???).__call__(*args, **kwargs)  # I'm not sure what should
go in the super here  (I'm using python3)

@classmethod
def normal_constructor(cls, *args, **kwargs):
    self = cls.__new__(cls)
    self.__init__(*args, **kwargs)
    return self

Is one of these correct? Or do they all do the same thing?

I was looking for documentation for what exactly `type.__call__` does so
that I can emulate it, but I wasn't able to find any docs explicitly
detailing what that method does. If someone knows where this info is that
would be great too.