[Python-Dev] Fwd: Things to Know About Super

[Matt Giuca]

Had a brief offline discussion with Michele - forwarding.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: michele.simionato at gmail.com <michele.simionato at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:13 AM

On Aug 24, 3:43 pm, "Matt Giuca" <matt.gi... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Michele,
>
> Do you have a URL for this blog?

Sorry, here it is:
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=micheles

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Matt Giuca <matt.giuca at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 1:15 AM

I skimmed (will read in detail later). As an "intermediate" (I'll describe
myself as) Python developer, I tend not to use/understand super (I just call
baseclassname.methodname(self,...) directly, so I guess I'm the target
audience of this article. It's good - very informative and thorough.

It's a bit too informal, personal, and opinionative to be used as
"documentation" IMHO but it could certainly be cleaned up without being
rewritten.

Of interest though, is this:
"The first sentence is just plain wrong: super does not return the
superclass."

>From what I remember of using super, this statement is true, and the
documentation is wrong (or at least over-simplifies things).
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/functions.html#super
http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/library/functions.html#super
Perhaps this should be amended? (A brief statement to the effect of super
creating a proxy object which can call the methods of any base class). It
actually mentions the "super object" later, even though it claims to be
returning the superclass.

Also Michele, looks as if super in Python 3 works about the same but has the
additional feature of supporting 0 arguments, in which case it defaults to
super(this_class, first_arg). (Does not create unbound super objects).

Matt
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