On Sat, Mar 30, 2002, Guido van Rossum wrote:
David Abrahams:
Given that Bool is immutable, I have no cases other than examples of type introspection which can be written to account for the fact that Bool is-a Int. However, it does make certain things trickier to get right:
numeric_types = [ Int, Long, Bool, Float, Complex ] for t in numeric_types: if isinstance(x, t): # Do something...
This sort of thing could depend on getting the order of the list right (I didn't).
Using isinstance() this way is usually bad. And who knows that long doesn't inherit from int? (At some point in the future it may, or they may become the same thing -- see PEP 237.
The problem is that in some cases the __init__ for a class needs to dispatch based on the type of the operand. For example, int() takes both numbers and strings. What should we recommend as "standard practice" for this issue if isinstance() is disrecommended?
Ah, bollocks. David was just being annoying, and I was being annoying back. You can use isinstance() when it makes sense, like your example. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)