Book Image

Learning Object-Oriented Programming

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Learning Object-Oriented Programming

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Object-Oriented Programming
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Encapsulating data in Python


First, we will add attributes to a class in Python and then use prefixes to hide specific members of a class. We will use property getters and setters to control how we write and retrieve values to and from related attributes. We will use methods to add behaviors to classes, and we will create the mutable and immutable version of a 3D vector to understand the difference between an object that mutates state and an object that doesn't.

Adding attributes to a class

The TibetanSpaniel class is a blueprint for dogs that belong to the Tibetan Spaniel breed. This class should inherit from a Dog superclass, but we will forget about inheritance and other dog breeds for a while. We will use the TibetanSpaniel class to understand the difference between class attributes and instance attributes.

As happens with any other dog breed, Tibetan Spaniel dogs have some profile values. We will define the following class attributes to store the values that are shared by all the members...