On Oct 1, 2019, at 06:23, Richard Musil <risa20...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Where *virtual* is a hyperlink to an ABC definition. > > `issubclass` will be fine without virtual and I am not sure why virtual has > been added to it
Virtual subclassing is key to the way ABCs work. It would be nice if it were explained better in the docs, but I suppose usually people don’t need to know the details unless they’re actually getting involved in something like designing new ABCs, so… The general feature is that any class can define a subclass-testing dunder method to tell issubclass what to do, and likewise for isinstance. That’s what virtual subclassing means: your class’s subclass hook can say that something is a subclass even though it didn’t inherit from you. This is what allows ABCs like Iterable to simulate structural subtyping. In Java, you can implement all the methods you want, but you won’t be usable as an iterable unless you also inherit from the IIterable interface. In Go, if you implement the right methods, you are automatically usable as an Iterable without inheriting anything. ObjC allows you to define both kinds of relationships, because sometimes one is useful, sometimes the other. Python gives you a general framework that lets you define both kinds of relationships—and more; e.g., you can handle relationships that aren’t quite structurally (Go-style) checkable, like Sequence, and you can fudge around legacy issues rather than having to get everything perfect before you can use new features. And it does it without needing any special language-level magic like Go, by just treating issubclass itself (and likewise isinstance) as a protocol, with a dunder method, like __getattr__ or anything else. The ABC metaclass gives you some helpers to make it easier to implement virtual subclassing correctly and consistently, like a single simpler method you can override to handle both hooks at once, a registry to allow classes to explicitly claim they match your ABC, and a few other things. The collections.abc module adds an additional helper on top of that to help its ABCs test for methods properly (because it’s not as simple as it should be). But the real magic is making issubclass a protocol that’s overridable the same as everything else in Python. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/QEGAOLVXE6YJ67PD6HYNFEHPWBNPRXNC/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
