Thanks for all the additional replies thus far! Apparently the issue, as stated implicitly or explicitly by most of you, is that new-style class instances essentially defer their magic methods to the class's static versions of same. This is good to know :)
Ironically, the reason I'm using new-style classes is that I only read up on them very recently, and was attempting to get myself into the habit of inheriting from 'object' by default. Go figure. Anyway, to take a step back, the *actual* actual reason for my investigation into this issue is that I'm attempting to create a collection of classes representing HTML page/form elements, many of which are represented differently depending on whether they're in a "view" or "edit" state. And ideally I wanted to be able to hold a collection of these objects and toggle them all to one state or the other, then bandy them about as if they were strings, e.g. mixing them with literal strings via str (obj). Clearly there are at least a handful of ways to accomplish this, but the one that came to mind first was, as I said at the beginning, to define both behaviors on each object and then have the ability to point __str__ to one or the other. I suppose now I need to figure out which is more important, that ease-of-use of overriding __str__ or whatever benefits new-style classes give (something I'm still a bit unclear on). Thanks again, Jeff -- Jeffrey E. Forcier Junior Developer, Research and Development Stroz Friedberg, LLC 15 Maiden Lane, 12th Floor New York, NY 10038 [main]212-981-6540 [direct]212-981-6546 http://www.strozllc.com This message is for the named person's use only. It may contain confidential, proprietary or legally privileged information. No right to confidential or privileged treatment of this message is waived or lost by any error in transmission. If you have received this message in error, please immediately notify the sender by e-mail or by telephone at 212.981.6540, delete the message and all copies from your system and destroy any hard copies. You must not, directly or indirectly, use, disclose, distribute, print or copy any part of this message if you are not the intended recipient. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
