Recently, I've been delving into the world of OOP in Python and trying to grasp some basic concepts. One question that popped up was related to subclassing a class like list and how to properly invoke the parent constructor. After experimenting a bit, I stumbled upon the following syntax:
super(subclass_name, self).__init__(args)
But what puzzles me is why can't we simply use something like list(args) or list.__init__(args)?
Below is a snippet of the code where this issue arises:
class slist(list):
def __init__(self, iterable):
# super(slist, self).__init__(iterable) <--- This works
list.__init__(iterable) # This does not work
self.__l = list(iterable)
def __str__(self):
return ",".join([str(s) for s in self.__l])