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Muhammad khan
Python Development Techdegree Student 1,836 PointsAttributes and Class
I am not clear on how a class is instantiated.
He gave an example of age_string = str(25). Here class is str and age_string is an instant of the class str?
Also, in teacher's note, we are calling a class to create and instance. I don't understand why we didn't pass any argument(or do we call it a parameter?) in the class like we did in the above example with str(25). we passed 25 to a str class.
new_instance = New_Class() ----> New_Class(?)
1 Answer
Mark Tripney
8,666 PointsHey, Muhammad.
Yes, you're right — remember, everything in Python is an object: strings, integers, functions, etc. So, age_string = str(25) is instantiating (creating) an instance from the str class, called age_string. On instantiation, the str class is passed an argument of 25.
On your other point, it's simply not necessary to pass arguments when instantiating an object. We can write a class like so...
class NewClass:
pass
... and instantiate an object like so...
my_object = NewClass()
This is a pretty uninteresting object and class, but valid! (For clarity, pass, in the above example, is a null operation — it's a useful placeholder as, when it's executed, nothing happens.)