class inheritance

[Jack Diederich]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:03 PM, JLundell <jlundell at pobox.com> wrote:
> I've got a subclass of fractions.Fraction called Value; it's a mostly
> trivial class, except that it overrides __eq__ to mean 'nearly equal'.
> However, since Fraction's operations result in a Fraction, not a
> Value, I end up with stuff like this:
>
> x = Value(1) + Value(2)
>
> where x is now a Fraction, not a Value, and x == y uses
> Fraction.__eq__ rather than Value.__eq__.
>
> This appears to be standard Python behavior (int does the same thing).
> I've worked around it by overriding __add__, etc, with functions that
> invoke Fraction but coerce the result. But that's tedious; there are a
> lot of methods to override.
>
> So I'm wondering: is there a more efficient way to accomplish what I'm
> after?

If Fraction.__add__ returns a new object but the subclass Value is
compatible (as I would except since it is a sublcass) then just change
all references in Franction.__add__ to be more generic, ex/

class Franction():
  def __add__(self, other):
    return self.__classs__(self.denominator + other.denominator)

That way if __add__ is called by an instance of a subclass it will
return an instance of that subclass.

-Jack