[Tutor] Class Inheritance, Beat it into the Ground

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2010 03:41:04 pm David Hutto wrote:
> In previous post I asked about  turtle module importing from tkinter.
> But what I don't understand is why does Tkinter default it's casnvas
> to ScrolledCanvas in turtle.py, and then as a 'metaclass' for
> ScrolledCanvas in turtle it calls TK.Frame, which could have
> been set as a default within Tkinter itself?


Tkinter doesn't know anything about turtle. turtle is an independent 
module which is built on top of Tkinter.

>>> Tkinter.turtle

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#2>", line 1, in <module>
    Tkinter.turtle
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'turtle'

Yes, Tkinter could have had a ScrolledCanvas. It could have had lots of 
things, you have to draw the line somewhere otherwise you end up with 
one giant module that does *everything*:

>>> import UniversalModuleWithEverything  # takes a few hours to load
>>> UniversalModuleWithEverything. \
... Klingon_Wordprocessor_With_Graphics_Imbedded_Spreadsheet().run() 

*wink*

Tkinter doesn't do anything in turtle. turtle wants a ScrolledCanvas, 
and since Tkinter doesn't have one, it creates it. It uses Tkinter's 
Frame object as the base class (not a metaclass, metaclasses are an 
advanced technique which are very different). That way the 
ScrolledCanvas class inherits behaviour from Frame.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano