On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 09:45:32PM -0000, malmiteria wrote:
All we have today is the screwhammer, and in cases the screw part don't work, you're telling me to get rid of it all. hammer part included.
That's not how I see it. I see that we have a screwdriver (inheritence, including multiple inheritence) which is designed for the cases where you, the programmer, don't want to manually specify which superclass method to call, you want the interpreter to do it using the defined linearisation. And then we have a hammer, composition/delegation, for when you *do* want to control what method is called. As I see it, it is you who wants to combine the two into a screwhammer, so that you can use the same mechanism (super and inheritence) both for the inheritence case (follow the linearisation) and the composition/ delegation case (manually specify the method you want to call). That is exactly what you did in your Gobelin example, with the HalfBreed sometimes using plain old inheritence using super, and sometimes trying to jump part of the MRO and call a specific method, but you still used super for that. ``` class HalfBreed(ProudGobelin, CorruptedGobelin): def scream(self): if random.choice([True, False]): # This is plain old inheritence, in Python 3 we can # write it as just super().scream() super(HalfBreed, self).scream() else: # And this is a failed attempt to ignore inheritence # and delegate to ProudGobelin.scream using super. super(ProudGobelin, self).scream() ``` So in this example at least, you try to use the same screwdriver (super) for both inheritence (driving screws) and delegation (hammering nails). -- Steve