Steven Bethard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Terry Reedy wrote: >>>But if classmethods are intended to provide alternate constructors >> But I do not remember that being given as a reason for >> classmethod(). But I am not sure what was. > > Well I haven't searched thoroughly, but I know one place that it's > referenced is in descrintro[1]: > > "Factoid: __new__ is a static method, not a class method. I initially > thought it would have to be a class method, and that's why I added the > classmethod primitive. Unfortunately, with class methods, upcalls > don't work right in this case, so I had to make it a static method > with an explicit class as its first argument. Ironically, there are > now no known uses for class methods in the Python distribution (other > than in the test suite).
Not true anymore, of course (it was in 2.2.3). In 2.3.5, UserDict, tarfile and some the Mac-specific module use classmethod, and the datetime extension module use the C version (the METH_CLASS flag). And staticmethod (and METH_STATIC) aren't used at all in 2.3 or 2.4 :-) [if you ignore __new__] -- |>|\/|< /--------------------------------------------------------------------------\ |David M. Cooke |cookedm(at)physics(dot)mcmaster(dot)ca -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
