I didn’t do as much As I thought I would today, as I was installing tightvnc on the Raspberry Pi. I then tried out acessing my RasPi on my Mac, Pc, and even my iPad mini. I wasn’t nuts enough t try it on my iPhone — yet. I did download the app though.

 

This should speed up the programming development side of things. Now, we are exploring classes.

Importing a Class

In our last installment, we learned how to make classes in Python. So we have something fresh to work with, open a new window and add this class:

#PSPythonStuff.py
class PSPythonStuff:
    def __init__(self,a,b):
        self.a = a
        self.b = b
        self.penguin = 0

    def myPythonFunction(self,a,b):
        return a+b*b
    def montyPythonFunction(self):
        return self.a+self.b*self.b
    def montyPenguinFunction(self):
        return self.a + self.penguin * self.penguin

Save it as PSPythonStuff.py. We  created four functions in the class:

• A constructor for the class
• A function which computes a value all from parameters
• A function which computes a value all from attributes
• Another function which computes a value from attributes

In XCode, I am used to getting a custom class into another implementation file by using something like this:

#import "PSPythonStuff.h"

In Python we obviously don’t have a header declaring types for everything. Instead we open the implementation file, which needs to be in the same directory as the file loading it. If the class file, called a module contains multiple classes we can select the classes we want to load, and skip the ones we don’t. We can load all classes in the module like this:

from PSPythonStuff import *

Now open a new window and let’s test this. Type in the following code:

#class_demo_2

from PSPythonStuff import *

my_instance = PSPythonStuff(5,25)

print(my_instance.myPythonFunction(5,25))

print(my_instance.montyPythonFunction())

my_instance.a = 4
print(my_instance.montyPythonFunction())

print(my_instance.montyPenguinFunction())

Save this as class_demo_2.py and run this code. If all goes correctly you should get the numbers

630
630
629
4

printed on your console. Besides using functions of the class, we also re-assigned an attribute with a new value.

The Disturbing Attribute

Go back to the PSPythonStuff.py module. Remove the following line of code:

self.penguin = 0

Now go back to class_Demo_2 module, and run it again. It should be no big surprise what happens:

   return self.a + self.penguin * self.penguin
AttributeError: 'PSPythonStuff' object has no attribute 'penguin'

We used penguin as an attribute and it is not defined anywhere. Add the following to just above the last print line in the module

my_instance.penguin = 25

your code should now look like this:

#class_demo_2

from PSPythonStuff import *

my_instance = PSPythonStuff(5,25)
print(my_instance.myPythonFunction(5,25))
print(my_instance.montyPythonFunction())
my_instance.a = 4
print(my_instance.montyPythonFunction())
my_instance.penguin = 25
print(my_instance.montyPenguinFunction())

Save and run your code. The console gives the following

630
 630
 629
 629

That this works disturbs me. It is as disturbing as someone grafting a third arm on, then playing the guitar with it minutes later. It should not run and the Python interpreter should have a hissy fit about adding an attribute to a class outside of the class definition. But that would be Xcode freaking out, not Python. Python apparently doesn’t care if you pull this. It puts a lot of responsibility on the programmer. Here’s where it gets us into trouble. There might be an attribute in one instance of a class that isn’t in another. Trying to reference that attribute could cause a fatal error.

I’m sure Python has its reasons for this, but coming from a much more structured environment it scares the willies out of me what bugs will lie in the code I’ll write.