Is everything an object in Python like Ruby?

python ruby object language-comparisons
johnny picture johnny · May 14, 2009 · Viewed 31.2k times · Source

I read on another Stack Overflow question that Python was just like Ruby, as it relates to "everything's an object," and everything in Python was an object, just like Ruby.

Is this true? Is everything an object in Python like Ruby?

How are the two different in this respect or are they really the same? For example, can you take a number and do the Ruby stuff I've seen like:

y = 5.plus 6

Can that be done the same way in Python?

Answer

Unknown picture Unknown · May 14, 2009

DiveIntoPython - Everything Is an Object

Everything in Python is an object, and almost everything has attributes and methods. All functions have a built-in attribute __doc__, which returns the doc string defined in the function's source code. The sys module is an object which has (among other things) an attribute called path. And so forth.

Still, this begs the question. What is an object? Different programming languages define “object” in different ways. In some, it means that all objects must have attributes and methods; in others, it means that all objects are subclassable. In Python, the definition is looser; some objects have neither attributes nor methods (more on this in Chapter 3), and not all objects are subclassable (more on this in Chapter 5). But everything is an object in the sense that it can be assigned to a variable or passed as an argument to a function (more in this in Chapter 4).

Ruby Docs - To Ruby From Python

As with Python, in Ruby,... Everything is an object

So there you have it from Ruby's own website: in Python everything is an object.

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