13.13. Customizing Classes with Special Methods
We covered two important aspects of methods in preceding sections of this chapter, the first being that methods must be bound (to an instance of their corresponding class) before they can be invoked. The other important matter is that there are two special methods which provide the functionality of constructors and destructors, namely __init__() and __del__() respectively.
In fact, __init__() and __del__() are part of a set of special methods which can be implemented. Some have the predefined default behavior of inaction while others do not and should be implemented where needed. These special methods allow for a powerful form of extending classes in Python. In particular, they allow for:
Emulating ...
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