On 02/02/2021 23:08, Greg Ewing wrote:
On 3/02/21 4:52 am, Phil Thompson wrote:
Thanks - that's fairly definitive, although I don't really understand why __new__ has this particular requirement.
The job of tp_new is to initialise the C struct. To do this, it first has to initialise the fields of the struct it inherits from, then initialise any fields of its own that it adds, in that order.
Understood.
Initialising the inherited fields must be done by calling the tp_new for the struct that it inherits from. You don't want to call the tp_new of some other class that might have got inserted into the MRO, because you have no idea what kind of C struct it expects to get.
I had assumed that some other magic in typeobject.c (eg. conflicting meta-classes) would have raised an exception before getting to this stage if there was a conflict.
Cooperative calling is a nice idea, but it requires rather special conditions to make it work. All the methods must have exactly the same signature, and it mustn't matter what order they're called in. Those conditions don't apply to __new__, especially at the C level where everything is much more strict type-wise.
Thanks for the explanation. Phil