[Python-3000] ABC's, Roles, etc

[Guido van Rossum]

On 5/12/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
> > From this point, issubclass(InstrumentedList, Sequence) will be true
> > (and likewise for instances of it and isinstance(x, Sequence)). But
> > InstrumentedList's __mro__ and __bases__ are unchanged.
>
> I think I've figured out what bothers me about this
> kind of overloading of isinstance(). Normally if
> isinstance(x, C) is true, we expect that a method
> call on x can at least potentially invoke a method
> of class C. But if isinstance(x, C) can be true
> even if C doesn't appear in the mro of x, this is
> no longer the case.

Well, not if x.__class__ overrides all of C's methods. And this
registration business we're *supposed* to register only classes that
provide concrete implementation of all of C's methods, which comes
down to the same thing.

Also, I'm unclear under what circumstances knowing that would make a
difference in your understanding of a program?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)