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Class Definition: the class Statement

We create a class definition with a class statement. We provide the class name, the parent classes, and the method function definitions.

class name (parent) : suite

The name is the name of the class, and this name is used to create new objects that are instances of the class. Traditionally, class names are capitalized and class elements (variables and methods) are not capitalized.

The parent is the name of the parent class, from which this class can inherit attributes and operations. For simple classes, we define the parent as object. Failing to list object as a parent class is not — strictly speaking — a problem; using object as the superclass does make a few of the built-in functions a little easier to use.

The suite is a series of function definitions, which define the class. All of these function definitions must have a first positional argument, self, which Python uses to identify each object's unique attribute values.

The suite can also contain assignment statements which create instance variables and provide default values.

The suite typically begins with a comment string (often a triple-quoted string) that provides basic documentation on the class. This string becomes a special attribute, called __doc__. It is available via the help function.

For example:

>>> 
import random

>>> 
class Die(object):
        """Simulate a 6-sided die."""
        def roll( self ):
            self.value= random.randrange(1,7)
            return self.value

        def getValue( self ):
            return self.value

We imported the random module to provide the random number generator.

We defined the simple class named Die, and claimed it as a subclass of object. The indented suite contains three elements.

  • The docstring, which provides a simple definition of the real-world thing that this class represents. As with functions, the docstring is retrieved with the help function.

  • We defined a method function named roll. This method function has the mandatory positional parameter, self, which is used to qualifty the instance variables. The self variable is a namespace for all of the attributes and methods of this object.

  • we defined a method function named getValue. This function will return the last value rolled.

When the roll method of a Die object is executed, it sets that object's instance variable, self.value, to a random value. Since the variable name, value, is qualified by the instance variable, self, the variable is local to the specific instance of the object. If we omitted the qualifier, Python would look in the global namespace for a variable named value.


 
 
  Published under the terms of the Open Publication License Design by Interspire