Type Objects

In fact, even types themselves are an object type in Python: the type of an object is an object of type type (say that three times fast!). Seriously, a call to the built-in function type(X) returns the type object of object X. The practical application of this is that type objects can be used for manual type comparisons in Python if statements. However, for reasons introduced in Chapter 4, manual type testing is usually not the right thing to do in Python, since it limits your code’s flexibility.

One note on type names: as of Python 2.2, each core type has a new built-in name added to support type customization through object-oriented subclassing: dict, list, str, tuple, int, float, complex, bytes, type, set, and more (in Python 2.6 but not 3.0, file is also a type name and a synonym for open). Calls to these names are really object constructor calls, not simply conversion functions, though you can treat them as simple functions for basic usage.

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In addition, the types standard library module in Python 3.0 provides additional type names for types that are not available as built-ins (e.g., the type of a function; in Python 2.6 but not 3.0, this module also includes synonyms for built-in type names), and it is possible to do type tests with the isinstance function. For example, all of the following type tests are true:

type([1]) == type([])               # Type of another list
type([1]) == list                   # List type name
isinstance([1], list)               # List or customization thereof

import types                        # types has names for other types
def f(): pass
type(f) == types.FunctionType

Because types can be subclassed in Python today, the isinstance technique is generally recommended. See Chapter 31 for more on subclassing built-in types in Python 2.2 and later.

Also in Chapter 31, we will explore how type(X) and type-testing in general apply to instances of user-defined classes. In short, in Python 3.0 and for new-style classes in Python 2.6, the type of a class instance is the class from which the instance was made. For classic classes in Python 2.6 and earlier, all class instances are of the type “instance,” and we must compare instance __class__ attributes to compare their types meaningfully. Since we’re not ready for classes yet, we’ll postpone the rest of this story until Chapter 31.