Organizing Objects into Classes
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Although we previously grouped several expressions into collections, such as lists and dictionaries, they don’t have the natural feel or use of built-in types like integers or strings. Are you limited to only those core objects that come with Python? Can you construct new kinds of things complete with operations you can perform on them? Can you hide the data you use and the way you operate on it? If you want to extend an object with additional data or operations, can you do it?
Of course you can, or this chapter would not exist! In what follows, I describe how to create classes and the objects, or instances, that belong to them. A function that operates on class instances gets a new name: method. By careful definition of a class, you can hide its internal information and how you manipulate...
