Alternative for inheritance in python

If you're really determined to avoid inheritance, just define a function outside of either class:

def get_name(object):
 return object.name

class A(object):
 name = 'foo'
 def get_name(self): # the common function
 return self.name
class B(A):
 pass

In this case B would inherit from A

Is there a reason you can't have B inherit from A?

class B(A):
 name = 'bar'

Since you are decorating name with @property, I am assuming you want this to be an instance variable. If you want this to return a more private variable, let's call it _name, you have to do:

class A(object):
 def __init__(self):
 self._name = 'foo'
 @property
 def name(self):
 return self._name

You can't have both a variable and a function have the same name, since the latter will simply override the former. If you want a base class that takes care of this, it would look like this:

class HasName(object):
 def __init__(self, name):
 self._name = name
 @property
 def name(self):
 return self._name
class A(HasName):
 def __init__(self):
 self._name = 'foo'
class B(HasName):
 def __init__(self):
 self._name = 'bar'

You can also call the constructor in HasName.

Assuming self.name stands in for a more complex method, the easiest way to cut down on duplicated code is to move the function out to the module and have it take an arbitrary object as a parameter. Then, if you still want to tie the method directly to the class, you can add a short method that dispatches to the module function.

def _name(obj):
 return obj.name
class A(object):
 # ...
 @property
 def name(self):
 return _name(self)
class B(object):
 # ...
 @property
 def name(self):
 return _name(self)

Note that this will not work well if A.name and B.name have completely different behaviors. If the _name function starts checking the type of the object given, reconsider whether you really want to abstract that functionality in the first place.

• python