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__init__ is the initialiser

Gregory Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sun Feb 2 18:38:00 EST 2014 
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> (In hindsight, it was probably a mistake for Python to define two create-
> an-object methods, although I expect it was deemed necessary for 
> historical reasons.

I'm not sure that all of the reasons are historical. Languages
that have a single creation/initialisation method also usually
have a mechanism for automatically calling a base version
of the method if you don't do that explicitly, and they
typically do it by statically analysing the source. That's
not so easy in a dynamic language.

If Python only had __new__, everyone who overrode it would
have to start with an explicit call to the base class's
__new__, adding a lot of boilerplate and forcing people
to learn how to make base method calls much sooner than
they would otherwise need to.

-- 
Greg
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