My experiance is mostly with old-style classes, but here goes. first off, the <what> question is actually easier than you think. After all, self is an instance of a string, so self[3:4] would grab the slice of characters between 3 and 4 =)
as for __init__, what I have found is that if you do not include an __init__ function, the parent class's __init__ gets inherited, just like any other function, so you dont need one. If you have multiple inheritance, however, you must include an __init__ which calls the __init__ on every parent, otherwise only the first parent's gets called. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
