Using a class' __new__ method as a Factory: __init__ gets called twice
When you construct an object Python calls its __new__
method to create the object then calls __init__
on the object that is returned. When you create the object from inside __new__
by calling Triangle()
that will result in further calls to __new__
and __init__
.
What you should do is:
class Shape(object): def __new__(cls, desc): if cls is Shape: if desc == 'big': return super(Shape, cls).__new__(Rectangle) if desc == 'small': return super(Shape, cls).__new__(Triangle) else: return super(Shape, cls).__new__(cls, desc)
which will create a Rectangle
or Triangle
without triggering a call to __init__
and then __init__
is called only once.
Edit to answer @Adrian's question about how super works:
super(Shape,cls)
searches cls.__mro__
to find Shape
and then searches down the remainder of the sequence to find the attribute.
Triangle.__mro__
is (Triangle, Shape, object)
andRectangle.__mro__
is (Rectangle, Shape, object)
while Shape.__mro__
is just (Shape, object)
.For any of those cases when you call super(Shape, cls)
it ignores everything in the mro squence up to and including Shape
so the only thing left is the single element tuple (object,)
and that is used to find the desired attribute.
This would get more complicated if you had a diamond inheritance:
class A(object): passclass B(A): passclass C(A): passclass D(B,C): pass
now a method in B might use super(B, cls)
and if it were a B instance would search (A, object)
but if you had a D
instance the same call in B
would search (C, A, object)
because the D.__mro__
is (B, C, A, object)
.
So in this particular case you could define a new mixin class that modifies the construction behaviour of the shapes and you could have specialised triangles and rectangles inheriting from the existing ones but constructed differently.
After posting my question, I continued searching for a solution an found a way to solve the problem that looks like a bit of a hack. It is inferior to Duncan's solution, but I thought it could be interesting to mention none the less. The Shape
class becomes:
class ShapeFactory(type): def __call__(cls, desc): if cls is Shape: if desc == 'big': return Rectangle(desc) if desc == 'small': return Triangle(desc) return type.__call__(cls, desc)class Shape(object): __metaclass__ = ShapeFactory def __init__(self, desc): print "init called" self.desc = desc
I can't actually reproduce this behavior in either of the Python interpreters I have installed, so this is something of a guess. However...
__init__
is being called twice because you are initializing two objects: the original Shape
object, and then one of its subclasess. If you change your __init__
so it also prints the class of the object being initialized, you will see this.
print type(self), "init called"
This is harmless because the original Shape
will be discarded, since you are not returning a reference to it in your __new__()
.
Since calling a function is syntactically identical to instantiating a class, you can change this to a function without changing anything else, and I recommend that you do exactly that. I don't understand your reluctance.