Do all class need constructors?(__init__)

[wavic]

Thank you @snippsat. Now I know what @staticmethod is doing. It's good for writing modules.

[volcano63]

I know, it's an old thread - I've stumbled on it by chance - but there's one thing no responder has explicitly stated -

explicit better than implicit

, right?
__init__ method is not a constructor; Python constructor is __new__

[Mekire]

This thread was indeed a little old to necro for not much reason but since we are here...

From a technical perspective you are correct; __new__ is the constructor. But from a practical standpoint, for all intents and purposes this distinction is meaningless. __init__ is the constructor as you are generally taught to think about them.

[volcano63]

But from a practical standpoint, for all intents and purposes this distinction is meaningless.  __init__ is the constructor as you are generally taught to think about them.

I don't think that it's meaningless. And I think that distinction is important.

Understanding this distinction is essential when explaining why __init__ should not contain return statement. And how __dict__ attribute "magically" appears in descendants of object class (Examples from recent discussions)

I don't remember C++ constructors too well - 9 years of abstention and going , but I remember they had this ugly initialization parts. This is what __init__ does - in much clearer way.