Why does assigning to self not work, and how to work around the issue?

Question

I have a class (list of dicts) and I want it to sort itself:

class Table(list):
…
  def sort (self, in_col_name):
    self = Table(sorted(self,          


        

Answer 1

I was intrigued by this question because I had never thought about this. I looked for the list.sort code, to see how it's done there, but apparently it's in C. I think I see where you're getting at; what if there is no super method to invoke? Then you can do something like this:

class Table(list):
    def pop_n(self, n):
        for _ in range(n):
            self.pop()

>>> a = Table(range(10))
>>> a.pop_n(3)
>>> print a
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

You can call self's methods, do index assignments to self and whatever else is implemented in its class (or that you implement yourself).