Subclassing datetime.date

[Sir Wilhelm the Sturdy]

Hi all,

I recently attempted to subclass the datetime.date object resulting in
horror and confusion, before submitting to a has-a relationship.
That's all fine and dandy, but out of curiosity I'd like to know what
I'm missing.

I was attempting to allow more flexible instancing of an object, like
so:

import datetime

class MyDate(datetime.date):

    def __init__(self,*args,**kw):

        if len(kw) + len(args) > 1:
            self.construct(*args,**kw)

    def construct(self,d,m=None,y=None,**kw):

        today = datetime.date.today()
        if m is None:
            m = today.month
        if y is None:
            y = today.year

        datetime.date.__init__(self,y,m,d,**kw)


However, it wasn't having the desired effect. Indeed, I could still
only instance it with 3 variables lest I get errors, and when I did
call it with 3 variables it didn't reflect the order change I had
implemented. Indeed, the properties were already set before it even
got to the construct method.

Is there some kind of built in I'm missing here?

Thanks all,
Will