At 09:56 AM 11/24/2007 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Also, there was discussion of this before: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-January/050625.html -- why didn't we decide to do it then?

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-January/051236.html There were also a few protests of use cases that could not be worked around (e.g. pickling methods), and a few people pointed out that the type checking actually *is* useful when using explicit base calls (BaseClass.somemethod(self,...)), as it usually catches when you forget to include the self argument.) (Note that super() doesn't do away with the need for such explicit upcalls, especially in __init__, as multiple-inheriting classes with non-cooperative bases usually need to individually call the base class __init__ methods.)