Circular Class Logic

Paul McGuire ptmcg at
Thu Mar 15 20:25:33 CET 2007

On Mar 15, 1:55 pm, half.ital... at wrote:
> > class Disk(Folder):
> >     def __init__(self,driveLetter):
> >         super(Disk,self).__init__(driveLetter+":/")
> What is going on there?  Is it just explicitly calling the super's
> init function?

What is going on is that Disk is being initialized with a single
character, such as 'D', and then calling the superclass with 'D:/',
the root folder on D.  You're the one who said that Disk was a
subclass of Folder (sorry, you called it "Data"), so I tried to come
up with an example in which this made some kind of sense.

> How is that really different from this:
> class Disk(Folder):
>   def __init__(self,driveLetter):
>     Folder.Folder.__init__(self.path) # ???  Being that Folder is the
> superclass?
Where did self.path come from?  Even though Folder is the superclass,
self.path doesn't exist until the Folder.__init__ method gets called.
This ain't C++ you know.  And as I said above, we are taking a single
character drive letter, and calling the superclass init with the root
directory of that drive, so these are .

> I'd like to be able to use the shared Disk objects in any class that
> is a subclass of Data.  Will the above method still make the Disk
> objects available in  Also, what if the classes are in
> different modules.
> I'll try to experiment with it this afternoon.  I'm using more
> information than just the drive letter.  What if the user wants to
> find out the unc path to the share given the drive letter, or copy a
> file to the local disk that is not a system disk that has the most
> available space on it, or wants to mount or unmount a network drive.
Knock yourself out.  I just hacked together these Folder/Disk classes
by way of a half-baked-but-working example.  My point is that to
initialize a class level variable on class Foo, all that is needed is
to assign it in the defining module, that is:

class Foo:

Foo.fooClassVar = "a class level variable"

Now any Foo or sub-Foo can access fooClassVar.  The type of
fooClassVar can be anything you want, whether it is a Foo, subclass of
Foo or whatever, as long as it has been defined by the time you assign

-- Paul

More information about the Python-list mailing list