NoneAs you go through the chapter, remember this specification and think about how we might use the new ideas in this chapter to implement it. This can absolutely be implemented without using the material in this chapter, but the goal is to implement it using the info
We want to store data for a number of theaters and the movies that are being shown at those theaters.
Each movie has:
Each theater has:
The output should look similar to this, depending on your theater names and movies:
McMenamin's Old St. Francis Theater is showing:
Star Wars (scifi, 125 minutes)
Shaun of the Dead (romzomcom, 100 minutes)
Tin Pan Theater is showing:
Shaun of the Dead (romzomcom, 100 minutes)
Citizen Kane (drama, 119 minutes)
Tower Theater is showing:
Star Wars (scifi, 125 minutes)
Shaun of the Dead (romzomcom, 100 minutes)
Citizen Kane (drama, 119 minutes)Note that multiple theaters might be showing the same movie title. Avoid duplicating the movie data as much as possible. (Remember: Don’t Repeat Yourself!)
Stretch goal: also store the per-theater showtimes for each movie at that theater.
Problem-solving step: Understanding the Problem.
Let’s first learn about the problem we’re trying to solve, and then let’s take a look at how classes and objects can help us solve it.
Okay, I said “problem”, but it’s actually multiple problems. Let’s start with the easier one.
Okay, I said “easier”, but really they’re the same.
Get on with it!
Let’s pretend you have a game where you have a starship that has multiple attributes. For example, it might have two attributes: XYZ coordinates in 3-space (e.g. [10, 20, 30]), and a ship name (e.g. "USS Enterprise").
These two pieces of information are clearly related. They apply to one single instance of a starship.
If we have multiple starships in the universe, they’ll each have their own names and coordinates.
So far so good?
Now… how do we store that data with what we know so far?
Well, we have lists, so let’s try with those. We’ll have three starships with different names and different locations:
ship_location = [
[10, 20, 30],
[-10, 20, -30],
[10, -20, 30]
]
ship_name = [
"MCRN Tachi",
"Red Dwarf",
"USCSS Nostromo"
]And then we can access ship #1 like this:
print(ship_name[1])
print(ship_location[1])So we have two lists, one for name and one for location104.
It works, but it’s a bummer to have to maintain two (or more) lists this way. If we ever added a ship, we have to be sure we add all the information to all the lists and make sure things don’t get out of order. It’s easy to make a mistake and get the lists out of sync.
What would be nice is if we could bundle all the information about one single ship into one single object that held the information about just that one ship. Other ships would be represented by other objects. And then we’d have a list of those objects—just one list to maintain!
Problem-solving step: Understanding the Problem.
What we’re starting to delve into here is the world of Object-Oriented Programming. To discuss everything about it would definitely be information overload, so we’re just going to start with the basics here, and revisit some of the concepts later.
A bit of terminology here, following up on the starship example from above.
First of all, we’re going to construct new starship objects that hold all the information about a single ship.
When the object is constructed, it is done based on a blueprint. We call this blueprint a class.
So we’re going to define a blueprint for a starship in a class, and then we’re going to build multiple, different starships based on that class.
Let’s do this as simple as possible to start. It’s not going to be a common way of doing things, but it’s a place to get your feet wet. We’ll fix it soon.
First of all, we’ll define a new class. Remember, this is just the blueprint for starships—it’s not a starship itself.
Class names use camel case105 by convention. Let’s define that starship class!
class StarShip:
pass…that’s it? What’s that pass in there?
Okay, you got me. I did say we were going to start simple (and not quite Right), in my defense. What we have there is a class StarShip, except it’s like a blank blueprint. There’s nothing in it.
The keyword pass means “do nothing” in Python. It’s just there to indicate to Python that there’s no body inside this class.
Random Terminology Facts: We also say a starship object is an instance of the
StarShipclass.Constructing a new starship object is also referred to as instantiating the object from the class.
Let’s go on to make a couple of objects from the blueprint.
class StarShip:
pass
s0 = StarShip()
s1 = StarShip()
s2 = StarShip()By putting parens after the class name, we’re telling Python that we are creating a new starship object from the StarShip class. In fact, we made three of them and saved a reference to each in s0, s1, and s2. Of course, none of them have names or locations, but we’ll remedy that shortly.
If we print one, we get something like this:
print(s1) # <__main__.StarShip object at 0x7fa11828c8e0>Not so pretty. But we’ll make that better soon, as well.
Problem-solving step: Understanding the Problem.
In the previous example, all our starship objects were identical and contained no information.
What we need is a way to pass that information in when the starships are constructed.
We do this by defining a special function inside the class.
Another Fun Terminology Fact: functions declared inside classes are called methods.
This special function is always named __init__() (with the dunders) and is called the constructor.
Let’s add a constructor to our StarShip class that allows us to pass in a ship name when the ship is constructed:
class StarShip:
def __init__(self, shipname): # The constructor
self.name = shipname
s0 = StarShip("MCRN Tachi")
s1 = StarShip("Red Dwarf")
s2 = StarShip("USCSS Nostromo")Whoa, now… that’s a lot of hard-to-read punctuation106 to sift through.
And there’s that crazy self parameter to the function, whatever that means!
Let’s start with self107. This is one of the hardest concepts to grok about in this chapter, so we’ll spend some time on it.
Remember how the class is the blueprint, and the objects are made from that blueprint?
And how after they’re constructed, you get a reference back to that newly-minted object? (These are the references we were storing in s0, s1, and s2.)
Well, what about the object that’s being constructed right now inside the __init__() method? It already exists but isn’t fully initialized yet. But inside the constructor, we have a reference to that object that is being built right now. And that reference is in self.
self means “the object that this method is operating on”.
What’s weird is that when we instantiated the starships, we only passed one argument to __init()__.
s0 = StarShip("MCRN Tachi")When clearly __init__() has two parameters: self and name. What gives?
def __init__(self, shipname): # The constructorDoesn’t the number of arguments need to match the number of parameters?
It does! But Python’s doing something sneaky behind your back, here. When a method has been called for a particular object, Python automagically fills in the first parameter with the object that is being operated on. We don’t have to worry about it.
Python then takes the arguments we did pass and tacks them on after that.
Let’s take a look at that constructor again:
class StarShip:
def __init__(self, shipname): # The constructor
self.name = shipname
s0 = StarShip("MCRN Tachi")This is a really common pattern, so let’s make sure we understand what’s going on here. In particular, there’s a weird dot after self. What does that mean? But before we get there, let’s look at shipname.
When we create our new starship s0, we pass in the name "MCRN Tachi". This calls the constructor __init__().
Python automatically puts a reference to the object that’s now being constructed into self. And then it copies the string "MCRN Tachi" to the shipname parameter of the function. So shipname is "MCRN Tachi".
And now we’re to the guts of the thing. self.name? The saga continues!
Problem-solving step: Understanding the Problem.
Objects have variables attached to them, and we call these attributes108.
Attributes are qualities that an object possesses—what things it has. For example, a starship would possess a name. In other words, a starship would have a name attribute.
And we refer to these attribute by using the dot operator (.).
When we have a line like this:
self.name = shipnameWe’re saying “change the name attribute on this starship object to be the same as the shipname parameter that was passed into this method”.
This is how we take the ship name that was passed in as an argument and attach it to the newly constructed object! We save a reference to the name in an attribute on the object!
Note that I named shipname differently than ship deliberately. (I did this to show that they could be different, but also to avoid confusion when looking at the example.) But it’s far more common to just name them the same thing. This is OK since self.name, the attribute on self, is different than name, the parameter.
Like so:
class StarShip:
def __init__(self, name): # The constructor
self.name = nameProblem-solving step: Understanding the Problem.
Now let’s add one more thing to our starships: their location.
Instead of passing the location into the constructor, let’s just initialize it to location [0,0,0] right off the bat. Then we can manually set it later.
class StarShip:
def __init__(self, name): # The constructor
self.name = name
self.location = [0, 0, 0] # <-- Add thisAll ships will now start at [0,0,0] because that’s what the blueprint says they’ll do.
And we can print it! We’ll access the values in those attributes by using the dot operator on s0!
s0 = StarShip("MCRN Tachi")
print(s0.name) # MCRN Tachi
print(s0.location) # [0, 0, 0]But wait! There’s more! That’s not all!
You can also set values!
print(s0.name) # MCRN Tachi
s0.name = "Rocinante"
print(s0.name) # RocinanteAnd we could modify the location of the ship this way, as well:
s0.location[1] = 99
print(s0.location) # [0, 99, 0]This is important! Even though we’re changing the values for the attributes of s0, the attributes of the other objects (like s1 and s2) remain unchanged! (Until we explicitly change them.)
We’ve successfully bundled all the information about a single ship into this single object. Nice and consolidated.
Problem-solving step: Understanding the Problem.
Remember that methods are functions that are connected to the object. Just like you could think of attributes as things the object has, you can think of methods like things the object does.
Let’s add another method to set the ship location.
class StarShip:
def __init__(self, name): # The constructor
self.name = name
self.location = [0, 0, 0] # <-- Add this
def set_location(self, x, y, z):
"""Set a ship's location to x,y,z"""
self.location[0] = x
self.location[1] = y
self.location[2] = z
s0 = StarShip("MCRN Tachi")
print(s0.location) # [0, 0, 0]
s0.set_location(10, 20, 30)
print(s0.location) # [10, 20, 30]On line 6, we define our new method, set_location(). Importantly, notice the first parameter is self, which will be initialized to represent the object we’re setting the location of. (That is, when we call s0.set_location(), self will be set to refer to s0 inside set_location().)
Fun Debugging Fact: If you get an error about the incorrect number of arguments to your method, make sure you have
selfas the first parameter!
Then on line 17, when we call set_location() on s0, self gets set to s0, and x, y, and z get set to 10, 20, and 30, respectively.
Then we use x, y, z, and self inside the method to change the values in this ship’s location.
This way, when we print it out on line 19, we see the new values there.
Attributes!
Right now when we print one of our starship objects, Python prints something like this on the screen:
<__main__.StarShip object at 0x7fa11828c8e0>Not particularly useful. Let’s override that functionality and have it print something nicer.
Go ahead and add this method to the StarShip class:
def __str__(self):
"""Return string representation of this object."""
return f'{self.name}: {self.location}'The __str__() method returns a string to use any time an object is printed.
Now if we build three new ships and print them all:
s0 = StarShip("Rocinante")
s1 = StarShip("Red Dwarf")
s2 = StarShip("USCSS Nostromo")
s0.set_location(10, 20, 30)
s1.set_location(40, 50, 60)
s2.set_location(70, 80, 90)
print(s0)
print(s1)
print(s2)We get some nice output, like this:
Rocinante: [10, 20, 30]
Red Dwarf: [40, 50, 60]
USCSS Nostromo: [70, 80, 90]Perfect!
When you assign one object to another, you don’t get a second object. You get another reference to the first object. Just like happens with lists and dictionaries.
Or, another way, doing an assignment with an object does not result in a new object. Both variables are names for the same object. (Check out Appendix C for details.)
class Forest:
pass
x = Forest() # Construct a new object
y = x
x.antelopes = 4
print(y.antelopes) # 4, since y and x refer to the same objectThis means you can pass objects to functions as arguments, and the function can change the values in the object’s attributes.
def set_antelopes_to_10(o):
o.antelopes = 10
class Forest:
pass
x = Forest()
x.antelopes = 4
set_antelopes_to_10(x)
print(x.antelopes) # 10!Remember that when you call a function, it is assigning the argument into the parameter name, so both of them refer to the same object. That is, in the code above, o refers to the same object x does, just as if we’d done an assignment with o = x.
NoneWe’ve already seen that variables can point to the value None to indicate nothing.
This gets commonly used with objects to indicate some “not found” or error condition.
For example, let’s have a list of objects and a function to search them by name. The function should return the object that has a name attribute that matches the name parameter to the function.
But a question should naturally arise! What if there is no object by that name in the list? What should the function return? None is a prime candidate here.
class Person:
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name
def __str__(self):
return self.name
def get_person_by_name(person_list, name):
"""Return a person object with this name, or None if not found"""
for p in person_list:
if p.name == name:
# If we found them, return the object
return p
# If we got here, we didn't find anyone by that name
return None
person_list = [
Person("Annie"),
Person("Beej"),
Person("Chris")
]
p = get_person_by_name(person_list, "Chris")
print(p) # "Chris"
p = get_person_by_name(person_list, "Dave")
if p is None:
print("Dave's not here.")Sometimes at runtime, you want to see if an object has an attribute or not. Or maybe you have the attribute name as a string and you want to get or set that attribute on an object.
Three built-in functions help make this happen:
hasattr() tests to see if an attribute exists on an object.getattr() returns the value of an attribute, optionally returning a default value if the attribute doesn’t exist.setattr() sets the value of an attribute, creating it if it doesn’t exist.This gives you more flexibility in writing your objects, because then you can have optional attributes on them.
Let’s demo!
class Foo:
pass
f = Foo()
f.bar = 12
print(hasattr(f, "bar")) # True
print(hasattr(f, "frotz")) # False
print(getattr(f, "bar")) # 12
print(getattr(f, "frotz", None)) # None, since attr frotz doesn't exist
setattr(f, "frotz", 99) # Just like saying "f.frotz = 99"
print(f.frotz) # 99I wouldn’t say that these functions get a lot of day-to-day use, but they’re a powerful thing to add to your toolkit.
In case you’ve forgotten, review the chapter project specification at the beginning of this chapter.
Problem-solving step: Understanding the Problem.
Looks like we need to store information about a number of theaters, as well as information about a number of movies.
And a movie might be showing in multiple theaters simultaneously.
Problem-solving step: Devising a Plan
There are a lot of ways to store this data. But since this chapter is all about classes and objects, how about we use those?
Looks like we should have a Theater class to handle information about each theater.
And a Movie class to handle information about each movie.
And a theater can be showing several movies, so we can give it an attribute that is a list of movies that is currently showing there.
We’ll also keep a list of all the theaters and a list of all the movies, as well.
Problem-solving step: Carrying Out the Plan
Here’s a theater class. We pass a name to the constructor but initialize the movies to an empty list. We can fill them in later.
class Theater:
"""Holds all the information about a specific theater."""
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name
self.movies = []
and a movie class:
class Movie:
"""Holds all the information about a specific movie."""
def __init__(self, name, duration, genre):
self.name = name
self.duration = duration
self.genre = genre
So far so good.
Now we need to instantiate a bunch of movies so that we can add them to the theaters’ .movie lists.
There are a couple of things we could do.
We could use one variable per movie, but that’s a bit unwieldy. Let’s use some kind of collection, like a list! We’ll make one for all the movies and all the theaters. Go ahead and add your favorites.
movies = [
Movie("Star Wars", 125, "scifi"),
Movie("Shaun of the Dead", 100, "romzomcom"),
Movie("Citizen Kane", 119, "drama")
]
theaters = [
Theater("McMenamin's Old St. Francis Theater"),
Theater("Tin Pan Theater"),
Theater("Tower Theater")
]
Take a look in there to see what we’ve done. Notice that movies is a list, and inside the list, while we’re initializing it, we’re constructing new Movie objects.
And we do the same thing with theaters. It’s a list of newly-constructed Theater objects.
Nextly, we need to associate those movies with the theaters that are showing them.
Remember that each Theater object has a list of movies in its .movies attribute. So we need to append the movies to that list.
This next bit is a little cryptic, so make sure
# McMenamin's is showing Star Wars and Shaun of the Dead
theaters[0].movies.append(movies[0])
theaters[0].movies.append(movies[1])
What’s that saying?
Well, take it a bit at a time, each line from left to right.
What’s theaters[0]?
If we look in our theaters list, we see that’s McMenamin’s.
And then we get its movie list with theaters[0].movies.
Its movies list is a list, so we can use the .append() list method to add a movie to it. But which movie to append?
We append movies[0]… and if we look in our movies list, we see that’s Star Wars.
So theater[0] is McMenamin’s, and movies[0] is Star Wars.
That means the first line, above, is saying, “Append ‘Star Wars’ to McMenamin’s list of currently showing movies.”
And the line below that is saying, “Append ‘Shaun of the Dead’ to McMenamin’s list of currently showing movies.”
Let’s do some more. What do each of these lines do?
# Tin Pan is showing Shaun of the Dead and Fastest Indian
theaters[1].movies.append(movies[1])
theaters[1].movies.append(movies[2])
# Tower is showing all three
theaters[2].movies.append(movies[0])
theaters[2].movies.append(movies[1])
theaters[2].movies.append(movies[2])
What we’ve done here, effectively, is linked up all the movie objects with their respective theaters.
Notice how movies are listed in multiple theaters. For example movies[0] (Star Wars) is in theaters[0] (McMenamin’s) and also in theaters[2] (Tower).
Does that mean there are two copies of the Star Wars Movie object? Since it’s in two theaters?
Think carefully!
No, there’s just one! The one we created back on line 15! Since it’s an object, making a “copy” through assignment (or with .append()) just makes another reference to the same object. There’s only one, but it’s referred to by two Theater objects. And also referred to by the movies list. So many references to the same object for good memory savings.
Now we want to print out all the theaters and their showtimes. I’m going to make a helper function here to print a single theater’s data. We’ll pass in a reference to a theater object, print its name, and then print the data for all the movies in its .movies list.
def print_theater(theater):
"""Print all the information about a theater."""
print(f'{theater.name} is showing:')
for m in theater.movies:
print(f' {m.name} ({m.genre}, {m.duration} minutes)')
And lastly, all we have to do is call print_theater() for all the theaters in our theaters list:
There we have it! (Solution109.)
Problem-solving step: Looking Back.
Check out how we looked at the problem description (which basically said “theaters show movies, and a movie might be shown at multiple theaters”) and mapped that into two classes to hold the information per theater and per movie.
Notice how the classes keep all the information for a theater or movie in a self-contained single object. Nice and clean, plus it’s easy to pass around a reference to an object if another function wants to use it.
What are some shortcomings?
Those lines where we add the movies to theaters are pretty hard to read. And they refer to things like movies[0] instead of referring to them by name.
It might be convenient to have some kind of helper function that could lookup the movie object by name, similar to this:
def find_movie_by_name(movies, name):
for m in movies:
if m.name == name:
return m
return None # Didn't find itand use that to clean up the code a bit. And something similar for theaters. (Of course, the more movies you have, the longer it takes to find one. A dictionary might be a faster data structure to use here.)
But this approach doesn’t handle the case where there are two movies or theaters of the same name. So another workaround would have to be found there—may be a unique identifier number for each theater and movie that we’d key off instead?
Now… what about that stretch goal to add movie times to all this?
Problem-solving step: Understanding the Problem.
This one might not seem tricky at first, but it comes to get you with the details.
You might think, no problem, we’ll just add times to the Movie class, right?
Yes, but… Different theaters are all showing the same movie. But at different times.
If you think about it, the times a movie is showing is more data attached to the theater, and not really data attached to the movie. It would make no sense for Disney to say, “Coming this Winter: Star Wars Episode 47, at 8 pm and 10 pm!” They don’t know when theaters are going to show the movie!
Okay, then, let’s attach the times to the Theater class.
But this presents us with another problem. How do we associate a set of times with a particular Movie object? We need a way in code to show that they’re linked so that we can print them out together.
Problem-solving step: Devising a Plan
We can do this with a new class—call it MovieTime—that contains both a reference to a movie and a list of times that movie is showing. And then we can add instances of this new class to the Theater objects.
In this way, if we have a reference to a Theater, we can look up its list of MovieTime objects, and then for each of those, look up the Movie object reference contained within and print it out along with the times.
We’re shimming a new class in the middle with both the movie and the showtimes. This is how we can bundle that together.
Problem-solving step: Carrying Out the Plan
Let’s add that new class that holds both a reference to a movie as well as the times it’s showing:
class MovieTime:
"""Holds a movie and the times it is playing"""
def __init__(self, movie, times):
self.movie = movie
self.times = timesThen we need to modify the Theater class to have a list of MovieTime objects instead of Movie objects.
class Theater:
"""Holds all the information about a specific theater."""
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name
self.movietimes = [] # <-- Now this is MovieTime objectsAnd now when we construct our lists of theater information, we need to add new MovieTime objects to the list in the theater. The MovieTime objects contain references to the movie being shown, as well as a list of showtimes.
# McMenamin's is showing Star Wars and Shaun of the Dead
theaters[0].movietimes.append(MovieTime(movies[0], ["7pm", "9pm", "10pm"]))
theaters[0].movietimes.append(MovieTime(movies[1], ["5pm", "8pm"]))
# Tin Pan is showing Shaun of the Dead and Fastest Indian
theaters[1].movietimes.append(MovieTime(movies[1], ["2pm", "5pm"]))
theaters[1].movietimes.append(MovieTime(movies[2], ["6pm", "8pm", "10pm"]))
# Tower is showing all three
theaters[2].movietimes.append(MovieTime(movies[0], ["3pm"]))
theaters[2].movietimes.append(MovieTime(movies[1], ["5pm", "7pm"]))
theaters[2].movietimes.append(MovieTime(movies[2], ["6pm", "7pm", "8pm"]))Lastly, when we print it out, we need to extract the movie and the show times from the MovieTime object so we can print them:
def print_theater(theater):
"""Print all the information about a theater."""
print(f'{theater.name} is showing:')
for mt in theater.movietimes:
m = mt.movie
t = " ".join(mt.times) # Make string of times separated by spaces
print(f' {m.name} ({m.genre}, {m.duration} minutes): {t}')And that’s that!
Output now looks like this:
McMenamin's Old St. Francis Theater is showing:
Star Wars (scifi, 125 minutes): 7pm 9pm 10pm
Shaun of the Dead (romzomcom, 100 minutes): 5pm 8pm
Tin Pan Theater is showing:
Shaun of the Dead (romzomcom, 100 minutes): 2pm 5pm
Citizen Kane (drama, 119 minutes): 6pm 8pm 10pm
Tower Theater is showing:
Star Wars (scifi, 125 minutes): 3pm
Shaun of the Dead (romzomcom, 100 minutes): 5pm 7pm
Citizen Kane (drama, 119 minutes): 6pm 7pm 8pmProblem-solving step: Looking Back.
Aside from the improvements noted in the last “Looking Back”, we might be able to fix this one up a bit with respect to how it handles times.
Right now, we’re storing the times in strings, but it would be better to store them as datetime objects from the Python standard library111.
This would enable us to do date math with the showtimes, e.g. to tell the user how many minutes until the next showing.
Remember: to get your value out of this book, you have to do these exercises. After 20 minutes of being stuck on a problem, you’re allowed to look at the solution.
Use any knowledge you have to solve these, not only what you learned in this chapter.
Always use the four problem-solving steps to solve these problems: understand the problem, devise a plan, carry it out, look back to see what you could have done better.
Write a class that describes a car. What are the attributes the class would have? What methods? (There’s no one right answer here—think freely.)
Write a class called SubwayCar that represents a single train car on a subway train. What attributes would it have? What methods?
Add a name attribute to the class so you can name the cars.
Add a next attribute to the class that points to the next SubwayCar in the train. This should refer to the next SubwayCar instance, or to None if it’s the last car.
Have a variable, head, that points at the first subway car.
This way you can “hook together” a train, like this (pseudocode):
head = SubwayCar("Engine")
car1 = SubwayCar("Passenger car 1")
car2 = SubwayCar("Passenger car 2")
car3 = SubwayCar("Passenger car 3")
head.next = car1
car1.next = car2
car2.next = car3
car3.next = None # End of the trainNow have a variable, location, that is your current location in the train. Start it at the head:
location = headThen write a loop to “walk” the location variable down the train (by following the next pointers), printing out the name of each car as it goes, until it reaches the end.
This famous data structure is actually called a linked list. But I disguised it as a subway train to be less intimidating.
Make a Room class that has a name attribute.
Also give it n_to, s_to, w_to, and e_to attributes. These will refer to the rooms that are north, south, west, and east of a particular room. None in one of these attributes means there’s no exit in that direction.
For example, two rooms that are hooked up west to east (and vice versa) could be constructed like this:
room0 = Room("Cobble Crawl")
room1 = Room("Debris Room")
room0.e_to = room1 # east from Cobble Crawl to Debris Room
room1.w_to = room0 # west from Debris Room to Cobble CrawlMake 5-6 rooms and hook them up in various directions.
Now have a variable, location, that is the current player location in the world. Start it pointing to the starting room, e.g.:
location = room0Next, get player input of either n, s, w, or e, and change location to the room in the specified direction.
If there’s no room there, print the string "You can't go that way.".
If the user enters q, quit the game.
All kinds of goodies in this chapter! We dipped our toes in the magical world of classes and objects, which is the beginning of learning the world-famous Object-Oriented Programming (OOP).
We saw how we could concisely bundle data and functionality into a single convenient class and the make objects from the class, using the class as a blueprint.
And, importantly, we learned that multiple variables can refer to the same object—that objects are not copied when you make an assignment.
Finally, we touched on the idea that None could be used to indicate “absence of an object”.
Though objects and classes form the basis for OOP, we really haven’t touched on what that means yet. But that’s a story for another chapter.