Using an operator to add in Python

Question

Consider:

operator.add(a, b)

I\'m having trouble understanding what this does. An operator is something like +-*/, so what doe

Answer 1

It literally is how the + operator is defined. Look at the following example

class foo():
    def __init__(self, a):
        self.a = a
    def __add__(self, b):
        return self.a + b

>>> x = foo(5)
>>> x + 3
8

The + operator actually just calls the __add__ method of the class

The same thing happens for native Python types,

>>> 5 + 3
8
>>> operator.add(5,3)
8

Note that since I defined my __add__ method, I can also do

>>> operator.add(x, 3)
8