I am trying to understand when to initialize a superclass when using inheritance in python. Initially I thought that just by declaring a class inheriting from a super class, ex. class my_class(superclass):, would make available all the superclass's attributes and methods to the subclass. Which makes sense for somebody coming from Java. Then I read that Python forces us to initialize superclasses before we can implement them in our subclass, either by using the superclass.init() or super().init(). Then I came across this piece of code where I am not initializing the parent's class, however Python gave me access to the self.queue attribute from superclass without having initialized the parent class. I read the Python documentation and sometimes I think I know what they mean and some other I dont. Can anyone please explain to me when do we have to initialize superclasses in our subclasses?
class QueueError(IndexError):
pass
class Queue:
def __init__(self):
self.queue = []
def put(self,elem):
self.queue.insert(0,elem)
def get(self):
if len(self.queue) > 0:
elem = self.queue[-1]
del self.queue[-1]
return elem
else:
raise QueueError
class SuperQueue(Queue):
def isempty(self):
if not self.queue:
return True
else:
return False
que = SuperQueue()
que.put(1)
que.put("dog")
que.put(False)
for i in range(4):
if not que.isempty():
print(que.get())
else:
print("Queue empty")
In general, if you override __init__
in your subclass, you should call the super __init__
method only. This is necessary if you extend the superclass. But if you want to overwrite the whole __init__
, you can also omit the super call.
Example:
You have class A
that has one attribute value1
.
And now you need a second attribute, so you subclass A
with B
and overwrite the __init__
where you call the super class (A
), so A
can set value1
and in B
you can not set value2
.
But now you need some other attributes in C
, but need the same methods as in A
. So you can entirely overwrite __init__
and omit the super call to A
.
class A:
def __init__(self, value1):
print("Initialize A")
self.value1 = value1
class B(A):
def __init__(self, value1, value2):
super().__init__(value1)
print("Initialize B")
self.value2 = value2
class C(A):
def __init__(self, value3):
print("Initialize C")
self.value3 = value3
a = A("foo")
b = B("foo", "bar")
c = C("baz")
print(a.value1)
print(b.value1, b.value2)
print(c.value3)
print(c.value1)
Output
$ python main.py
Initialize A
Initialize A
Initialize B
Initialize C
foo
foo bar
baz
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "main.py", line 27, in <module>
print(c.value1)
AttributeError: 'C' object has no attribute 'value1'
You can see C
wasn't initialized with value1
, because C
didn't call A
's __init__
.