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pythonthisself

Passing self into a constructor in python


I recently was working on a little python project and came to a situation where I wanted to pass self into the constructor of another object. I'm not sure why, but I had to look up whether this was legal in python. I've done this many times in C++ and Java but I don't remember ever having to do this with python.

Is passing references to self to new objects something that isn't considered pythonic? I don't think I've seen any python programs explicitly passing self references around. Have I just happen to not have a need for it until now? Or am I fighting python style?


Solution

  • Yes it is legal, and yes it is pythonic.

    I find myself using this pattern when you have an object and a container object where the contained objects need to know about their parent.