My fight with classes :)

[Peter Pearson]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:16:56 +0800, TheSaint <fc14301589 at icqmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm very new with classes. I still reading something around ;)
>
> I got started to try a concatenation of 2 type of string, which have a
> particular property to start with A or D.
>
> My class here:
>     """ Small class to join some strings according to the leading first
>      letter"""
>
>     def __init__(self):
>         self.valueA= ''
>         self.valueD= ''
>
>     def __add__(self, value):
>         if not isinstance(value, str): return
>         if value.lower().startswith('a'):
>             self.valueA += value
>         if value.lower().startswith('d'):
>             self.valueD += value
>         return self.valueA ,self.valueD
>
>     __call__= __add__
>     __iadd__= __add__
>
> my test on the shell:
>
[snip]
>>>> k +'aks'
> ('aks', '')
>>>> k +'daks'
> ('aks', 'daks')
[snip]
>>>> k += 'liu'
>>>> k += 'aliu'
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: can only concatenate tuple (not "str") to tuple

You have designed your class in a confusing way, and then you
were confused by it.

It was confusing to design your class in such a way that "k+'aks'"
modifies k, because "k+'aks'" appears to be just an expression.
Changing k as a side-effect of evaluating that expression is
unnecessarily confusing.  See if you can figure out how to design
your class so that you modify k either by writing "k.append( 'aks' )"
or "k += 'aks'".

Speaking of which, you discovered that "k += 'liu';
k += 'aliu'" fails.  It fails because "k += 'liu'" replaces k
with a tuple (because you return a tuple from your __add__
function), so k is no longer an instance of your class.


> Do I miss something?
>
> I'd rather like to avoid class, but a function won't allow me to store so
> easily data between several call.

Classes are wonderfully useful, and it would be sad for you to
use Python while shunning classes.  I strongly recommend looking
at some good examples of simple class programming; I apologize
for having no specific recommendations.

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