Any gotchas in returning a subclass instance from __new__?

[s.lipnevich]

Hi All,

Is anything wrong with the following code?

class Superclass(object):
def __new__(cls):
# Questioning the statement below
return super(Superclass, cls).__new__(Subclass)
class Subclass(Superclass):
pass
if __name__ == '__main__':
instance = Superclass()
print instance

It works here, and even constructors for Subclass and Superclass are
invoked (in correct order), even though such behavior is not explicitly
stated here http://docs.python.org/ref/customization.html. So, am I
asking for trouble or is it /the/ way to go about transforming base
class into a factory?
Thank you,

Sergey.

 

[Duncan Booth]

wrote:

Hi All,

Is anything wrong with the following code?

class Superclass(object):
def __new__(cls):
# Questioning the statement below
return super(Superclass, cls).__new__(Subclass)
class Subclass(Superclass):
pass
if __name__ == '__main__':
instance = Superclass()
print instance

The only problems I can think if is that if you create any other subclasses
of Superclass, or of Subclass for that matter then you'll never succeed in
creating any of them, and the constructor i.e. __new__ of the subclass
never gets called.

I've used this technique where the Superclass iterates through all of its
subclasses and uses the constructor parameters to choose the most
appropriate subclass to construct. Eventually though I changed it to use a
separate factory function: that way the __new__ methods get called in the
expected order.

So something like:

@classmethod
def fromMimetype(cls, m):
for subclass in Superclass._handlers():
if subclass.supportsMimetype(m):
return subclass(m)

@classmethod
def _handlers(cls):
for c in cls.__subclasses__():
for sub in c._handlers():
yield sub
yield c

It works here, and even constructors for Subclass and Superclass are
invoked (in correct order), even though such behavior is not explicitly
stated here http://docs.python.org/ref/customization.html. So, am I
asking for trouble or is it /the/ way to go about transforming base
class into a factory?
Thank you,

I think you meant the initialisers are invoked correctly (the constructor
is the __new__ method): this isn't suprising since the system simply calls
__init__ on the returned object so the correct thing just happens.