Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 10:20:58AM +0300, Eli Bendersky wrote:
Still, instance of type()" is a bit too cryptic for mere mortals, IMHO.
I think that if somebody finds "instance of type" too cryptic, they won't have any chance at all to understand metaclasses.
Personally, I think there is a lot confusing about metaclasses, but the idea that classes are instances (objects) is not one of them.
One thing that *is* confusing is that the metaclass parameter in class creation is not the metaclass (class of the class), but the class factory. For example: def silly(*args): print(*args) return int class C(metaclass=silly): def m(self): pass C () {'m': <function C.m at 0xb721fe14>, '__qualname__': 'C', '__module__': '__main__'} print(C) int In this example the metaclass (ie the class of C) is type (C is int), even though the declared metaclass is 'silly'. I assume it is too late to change the name of the 'metaclass' keyword to 'factory', but we could use that terminology in the docs. Cheers, Mark