Hi all, I've been using Python for 3 years, but I've rarely used its OOP features (I'm a physicist, sorry). Now, after having read a lot about Python OOP capabilities, I'm trying to get advantage of this (for me) new paradigm. As a result I've a lot of somewhat philosophical questions. I will start with one of them.
Suppose I have a bunch of classes that represent slightly (but conceptually) different object. The instances of each class must behave in very similar manner, so that I've created a common class ancestor (let say A) that define a lot of special method (such as __getattr__, __setattr__, __len__ and so on), and then I've created all my "real" classes inheriting from it: >>>class A(object): .... # here define all special and some common methods >>> class B(A): .... # this is the first "real" class >>> class C(A): .... # and this is the second and so on. The problem I'm worried about is that an unaware user may create an instance of "A" supposing that it has any real use, while it is only a sort of prototype. However, I can't see (from my limited point of view) any other way to rearrange things and still get a similar behaviour. Implementing those special methods directly in class B and then inherit from it, doesn't seem the right way, since I'd prefer that instances of B weren't in any relation with the instances of C (i.e. I'd prefer not to subclass C from B) Perhaps some OOP techniques (that I miss at the moment) could be of any help. Any suggestion? Thanks in advance, Andrea. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
