[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Guess i shouldn't think of the __init__(self) function as a constructor
then.

No, that's not it. You shouldn't think of variables defined outside of a method as instance variables.

In Java for example you can write something like

public class MyClass {
    private List list = new ArrayList();

    public void add(Object x) {
        list.add(x);
    }
}

In this case list is a member variable of MyClass instances; 'this' is implicit 
in Java.

In Python, if you write something that looks similar, the meaning is different:

class MyClass:
    list = []

    def add(self, x):
        self.list.append(x)

In this case, list is an attribute of the class. The Java equivalent is a static attribute. In Python, instance attributes have to be explicitly specified using 'self'. So instance attributes have to be bound in an instance method (where 'self' is available):

class MyClass:
    def __init__(self):
        self.list = []

    def add(self, x):
        self.list.append(x)

Kent
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