Force child class to override parent's methods
this could be your parent class:
class Polygon():
def __init__(self):
raise NotImplementedError
def perimeter(self):
raise NotImplementedError
def area(self):
raise NotImplementedError
although the problem will be spotted at runtime only, when one of the instances of the child classes tries to call one of these methods.
a different version is to use abc.abstractmethod
.
from abc import ABCMeta, abstractmethod
# simpler alternative: from abc import ABC, abstractmethod
import math
class Polygon(metaclass=ABCMeta):
# simpler alternative: class Polygon(ABC)
@abstractmethod
def __init__(self):
pass
@abstractmethod
def perimeter(self):
pass
@abstractmethod
def area(self):
pass
class Circle(Polygon):
def __init__(self, radius):
self.radius = radius
def perimeter(self):
return 2 * math.pi * self.radius
# def area(self):
# return math.pi * self.radius**2
c = Circle(9.0)
# TypeError: Can't instantiate abstract class Circle
# with abstract methods area
you will not be able to instantiate a Circle
without it having all the methods implemented.
this is the python 3
syntax; in python 2
you'd need to
class Polygon(object):
__metaclass__ = ABCMeta
also note that for the binary special functions __eq__(), __lt__(), __add__(), ...
it is better to return NotImplemented
instead of raising NotImplementedError
.
That's exactly what NotImplementedError
are used for :)
In your base class
def area(self):
raise NotImplementedError("Hey, Don't forget to implement the area!")
You can raise NotImplementedError
exception in base class method.
class Polygon:
def area(self):
raise NotImplementedError
Also you can use @abc.abstractmethod
, but then you need to declare metaclass to be abc.ABCMeta
, which would make your class abstract. More about abc
module