A Brief Summary of Terms and Concepts

Let’s do a quick rundown of some of the concepts and terms discussed thus far. The following code is a class definition, which specifies the attributes of objects that belong to the class/type Example.

class Example:
    a = (1, 2, 3)

    def __init__(self):
        self.b = "apple"

Once executed, this code produces the class object Example, which encapsulates the above definition and can be used to create objects that are instances of this class/type. Example.a and Example.__init__ are both attributes of this class. Example.__init__ is more specifically a special method, which is automatically invoked whenever an instance of this class is created.

The following code creates an instance of Example, assigning that instance to the variable ex. This means that the object belongs to the type (a.k.a class) Example.

>>> ex = Example()

>>> Example.a
(1, 2, 3)

>>> ex.a
(1, 2, 3)

>>> isinstance(ex, Example)
True

>>> type(ex)
__main__.Example

Upon this instantiation, the instance-level attribute b was defined via execution of the __init__ method, wherein Python passed the instance object being created as the argument self to the method. Thus b is an instance-level attribute, which is not possessed by Example itself.

>>> Example.b
AttributeError: type object 'Example' has no attribute 'b'

>>> ex.b
'apple'