Rita <rmorgan...@gmail.com> writes: >> I know its frowned upon to do work in the __init__() method and only >> declarations should be there.
In article <mailman.5555.1389834993.18130.python-l...@python.org>, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > Who says it's frowned on to do work in the initialiser? Where are they > saying it? That seems over-broad, I'd like to read the context of that > advice. Weird, I was just having this conversation at work earlier this week. There are some people who advocate that C++ constructors should not do a lot of work and/or should be incapable of throwing exceptions. The pros and cons of that argument are largely C++ specific. Here's a Stack Overflow thread which covers most of the usual arguments on both sides: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/293967/how-much-work-should-be-done-in -a-constructor But, Python is not C++. I suspect the people who argue for __init__() not doing much are extrapolating a C++ pattern to other languages without fully understanding the reason why. That being said, I've been on a tear lately, trying to get our unit test suite to run faster. I came across one slow test which had an interesting twist. The class being tested had an __init__() method which read over 900,000 records from a database and took something like 5-10 seconds to run. Man, talk about heavy-weight constructors :-) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
