The default metaclass

suggest change

You may have heard that everything in Python is an object. It is true, and all objects have a class:

>>> type(1)
int

The literal 1 is an instance of int. Lets declare a class:

>>> class Foo(object):
...    pass
...

Now lets instantiate it:

>>> bar = Foo()

What is the class of bar?

>>> type(bar)
Foo

Nice, bar is an instance of Foo. But what is the class of Foo itself?

>>> type(Foo)
type

Ok, Foo itself is an instance of type. How about type itself?

>>> type(type)
type

So what is a metaclass? For now lets pretend it is just a fancy name for the class of a class. Takeaways:

But why should you know about metaclasses? Well, Python itself is quite “hackable”, and the concept of metaclass is important if you are doing advanced stuff like meta-programming or if you want to control how your classes are initialized.

Feedback about page:

Feedback:
Optional: your email if you want me to get back to you:


Metaclasses:
* The default metaclass

Table Of Contents
2 Filter
3 List
7 Loops
18 Metaclasses
22 Reduce
27 Classes
31 Set
42 Tuple
45 Enum
62 Sockets
89 urllib
92 Idioms
104 Stack
105 Profiling
109 Logging
111 os module
118 Mixins
120 ArcPy
126 Arrays
132 2to3 tool
135 Unicode
138 Neo4j
140 Curses
141 Templates
145 heapq
146 tkinter
154 Audio
155 pyglet
157 ijson
160 Flask
161 Groupby
163 pygame
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
185 pyaudio
186 shelve