On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 11:24 PM, John Salerno <johnj...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi everyone. I created a custom class and had it inherit from the > "dict" class, and then I have an __init__ method like this: > > def __init__(self): > self = create() > > The create function creates and returns a dictionary object. Needless > to say, this is not working. When I create an instance of the above > class, it is simply an empty dictionary rather than the populated > dictionary being created by the create function. Am I doing the > inheritance wrong, or am I getting the above syntax wrong by assigning > the return value to self?
Assignment to `self` has no effect outside the method in question; Python uses call-by-object (http://effbot.org/zone/call-by-object.htm ) for argument passing. Even in something like C++, I believe assignment to `this` doesn't work. > I know I could do self.variable = create() and that works fine, but I > thought it would be better (and cleaner) simply to use the instance > itself as the dictionary, rather than have to go through an instance > variable. Call the superclass (i.e. dict's) initializer (which you ought to be doing anyway): super(YourClass, self).__init__(create()) Cheers, Chris -- http://rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
