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I am newbie to python object oriented programming. I am trying to understand binary tree implantation code using python.

My understanding is object.method is the way to call the function. But here the object is called as object[key]="value" without explicitly calling the function like object.put("key","value) . Please help me to understand this code.

Narendra
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asked Mar 25, 2018 at 5:26
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    Possible duplicate of A python class that acts like dict Commented Mar 25, 2018 at 5:30
  • Any class that implements the special __setitem__ method also supports the object[key] = value syntax. Commented Mar 25, 2018 at 5:31

1 Answer 1

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Like many languages that support object-oriented programming, Python has operators that can be overloaded by different classes as appropriate.

For example, when you write x + y, that calls x.__add__(y) (slightly oversimplified, but not in ways that are relevant here).

The [] here is just another operator. When you write object[key]="value", that calls object.__setitem__(key, "value").

So, you are doing object-oriented method calling, just with a little bit of syntactic sugar on top to make it more readable.

answered Mar 25, 2018 at 5:32
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