class - What is the purpose of checking self.__class__ ? - python

Question

What is the purpose of checking self.__class__ ? I've found some code that creates an abstract interface class and then checks whether its self.__class__ is itself, e.g.

class abstract1 (object):
  def __init__(self):
    if self.__class__ == abstract1: 
      raise NotImplementedError("Interfaces can't be instantiated")

What is the purpose of that? Is it to check whether the class is a type of itself?

The code is from NLTK's http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/api/nltk.probability-pysrc.html#ProbDistI

Answer 1

self.__class__ is a reference to the type of the current instance.

For instances of abstract1, that'd be the abstract1 class itself, which is what you don't want with an abstract class. Abstract classes are only meant to be subclassed, not to create instances directly:

>>> abstract1()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 4, in __init__
NotImplementedError: Interfaces can't be instantiated

For an instance of a subclass of abstract1, self.__class__ would be a reference to the specific subclass:

>>> class Foo(abstract1): pass
... 
>>> f = Foo()
>>> f.__class__
<class '__main__.Foo'>
>>> f.__class__ is Foo
True

Throwing an exception here is like using an assert statement elsewhere in your code, it protects you from making silly mistakes.

Note that the pythonic way to test for the type of an instance is to use the type() function instead, together with an identity test with the is operator:

class abstract1(object):
    def __init__(self):
        if type(self) is abstract1: 
            raise NotImplementedError("Interfaces can't be instantiated")

type() should be preferred over self.__class__ because the latter can be shadowed by a class attribute.

There is little point in using an equality test here as for custom classes, __eq__ is basically implemented as an identity test anyway.

Python also includes a standard library to define abstract base classes, called abc. It lets you mark methods and properties as abstract and will refuse to create instances of any subclass that has not yet re-defined those names.