Python OOP

• Python Namespace

Class Object

x = MyClass()
creates a new instance of the class and assigns this object to the local variable x.

Init

class Dog:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.tricks = []    # creates a new empty list for each dog
 
    def add_trick(self, trick):
        self.tricks.append(trick)
 
>>> d = Dog('Fido')
>>> e = Dog('Buddy')
>>> d.add_trick('roll over')
>>> e.add_trick('play dead')
>>> d.tricks
['roll over']
>>> e.tricks
['play dead']

Inheritance

class DerivedClassName(modname.BaseClassName):
Python has two built-in functions that work with inheritance:

• Use isinstance() to check an instance’s type: isinstance(obj, int) will be True only if obj.__class__ is int or some class derived from int.
• Use issubclass() to check class inheritance: issubclass(bool, int) is True since bool is a subclass of int. However, issubclass(float, int) is False since float is not a subclass of int.

Multiple Inheritance

class DerivedClassName(Base1, Base2, Base3):
For most purposes, in the simplest cases, you can think of the search for attributes inherited from a parent class as depth-first, left-to-right, not searching twice in the same class where there is an overlap in the hierarchy.
Thus, if an attribute is not found in DerivedClassName, it is searched for in Base1, then (recursively) in the base classes of Base1, and if it was not found there, it was searched for in Base2, and so on.

Private Variables

Any identifier of the form __spam (at least two leading underscores, at most one trailing underscore) is textually replaced with _classname__spam, where classname is the current class name with leading underscore(s) stripped.
This mangling is done without regard to the syntactic position of the identifier, as long as it occurs within the definition of a class.

class Mapping:
    def __init__(self, iterable):
        self.items_list = []
        self.__update(iterable)
 
    def update(self, iterable):
        for item in iterable:
            self.items_list.append(item)
 
    __update = update   # private copy of original update() method
 
class MappingSubclass(Mapping):
 
    def update(self, keys, values):
        # provides new signature for update()
        # but does not break __init__()
        for item in zip(keys, values):
            self.items_list.append(item)