The Quick Python Book, Third Edition

Chapter 17. Data types as objects

This chapter covers

• Treating types as objects
• Using types
• Creating user-defined classes
• Understanding duck typing
• Using special method attributes
• Subclassing built-in types

By now, you’ve learned the basic Python types as well as how to create your own data types using classes. For many languages, that would be pretty much it as far as data types are concerned. But Python is dynamically typed, meaning that types are determined at runtime, not at compile time. This fact is one of the reasons Python is so easy to use. It also makes it possible, and sometimes necessary, to compute with the types of objects (not just the objects themselves).

17.1. Types are objects, too

Fire up a Python session, and try out ...