Python Class Members Initialization

Question

I have just recently battled a bug in Python. It was one of those silly newbie bugs, but it got me thinking about the mechanisms of Python (I\'m a long time C++ programmer,

Answer 1

Pythons class declarations are executed as a code block and any local variable definitions (of which function definitions are a special kind of) are stored in the constructed class instance. Due to the way attribute look up works in Python, if an attribute is not found on the instance the value on the class is used.

The is an interesting article about the class syntax on the history of Python blog.