super() in tkinter application

Question

I am having trouble understanding this error.

In the below code,when I use tk.Frame everything works as intended. However if I use super(), I get thrown an AttributeError ('Application object has no attribute tk').

class Application(tk.Frame):
   def __init__(self,parent):
       tk.Frame.__init__(self,parent) <----- This works
       # super().__init__(self,parent) <------ This line throws an error
.
.
.

if __name__=='main':
  root=tk.Tk()
  Application(root).pack()
  root.mainloop()

It is my understanding that super(Application,self).__init__() will call the the __init__ method that is bounded to the class followed by child in the instance's MRO, which is, the class tkinter.Frame in my situation.

I verified this by printing out Application.__mro__ and checking.

So my question if both super().__init__(self,parent) and tk.Frame.__init__(self,parent) are referring to the same __init__ method of class tkinter.Frame, why is one throwing an error and the other working fine? I suspect I have some misunderstanding in the way super() works.

Answer 1

Python 3 super does not require to pass self as an argument.

The following example illustrates the correct way to call super to initialize the parent class of a widget:

import tkinter as tk 


class Application(tk.Frame):
    def __init__(self, parent):
        super().__init__(parent)
        tk.Button(self, text='Super!', command=root.destroy).pack()


root = tk.Tk()
Application(root).pack()
root.mainloop()

The reason is that the python core developers decided to simplify the use of super, and abstracted the passing of self to the underlying code that powers python.
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