classes and __init__ question

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 17, 3:19 pm, Alex Hall <mehg... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am a bit confused about classes. What do you pass a class, since all
> the actual information is passed to __init__? For example, say you
> have a dog class. The dog object has a name, a size, and a color. I
> believe you would say this:
>
> class dog():
>  def __init__(self, name, size, color):
>   self.name=name
>   self.size=size
>   self.color=color
>  #end def
> #end class
>
> What, then, gets passed to the class constructor?
> class dog(whatGoesHere?):
> Sometimes I see things passed to this. For example, if you create a
> class for a wxPython frame, you will say:
> class myapp(wx.App):
> In this case you pass something. However, I have a class that I use in
> one of my programs to create "contact" objects, which looks like this:
> class contact():
>  def __init__(self, name, email, status, service):
>   self.name=name
>   self.email=email
>   self.status=status
>   self.service=service
>  #end def
> #end class
>
> Here, I do not pass anything to the class, only to __init__. What is going on?
>
> On a related note, is it horrible for resource usage to create a large
> array, up to 500 or so, where each member is a small object? I am
> thinking of, for example, a game board array where each member of the
> array is a "square" object. A square might have a status, a color, and
> other flags associated with it, so you could then say something like
> board[i][j].hasGamePiece=True. Lookups and adjustments like this will
> be going on a lot. Am I better off using an array of numbers where
> each number means something different?
>
> Thanks in advance for any info.
>
> --
> Have a great day,
> Alex (msg sent from GMail website)
> mehg... at gmail.com;http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap

What you are calling "passing to a class" is the superclass (or list
of superclasses) if you are creating a subclass.

Under Python 2.x, you might want to subclass object (if you need/want
a newstyle class), so it is fairly common to see:

class foo(object):
   whatever

Regards,
Pat