I will start this lesson by talking about some basics of the python type system and the introduce the concept of afterwards. META-CLASSES To start out lets look at these basic examples: So every single thing you create in python has a type associated with it. from the example above the variable name is of type ( ) and age is of type ( ) and however each of these variables has a property or attribute of which in most cases we call a magic method in python, this attribute is the class which is instantiated in the creation of variables and in other word it is the type of the variable. so therefore and will return the same data which is ( ) for the variable in this case. str string int integer __class__ type(name) name.__class__ str string name see: However this idea also extends to the classes you create yourself. see: Based on the example we see that the variable is of type and the type is essentially the class we instantiated initially, so to create a new instance we use the class name and the expected parameters or arguments which will later be the associated type. However classes also have types associated with them. me User see: Therefore the class is of type which means the type class was instantiated with it's expected parameter which python takes care of to create the class . Moreover the parameters which the class takes are , so lets see how it all works behind the scenes. User type User type (clsname,bases,methods) see: So essentially what python does is that when you create a class it take the and feeds it to the class . clsname, bases and the functions or methods type So why , it turns out that the class is actually something that you can customize and modify. Well the question is how do we do that. The way we can modify classes is through inheritance. i.e meta-classes type see: with that done i think we are all set!!!!!. so lets go for a test drive see: As we can see this works almost as exact as the class type. if you notice when creating the a new class with the we created it had to print out a little info before making the class, which means the class was created through the we created earlier, so therefore the class above is an example of what is called a . custom_type_class custom_type_class META-CLASS So a simple definition of a meta-class will be: An alternate way to monitor or supervise what happens in class definition So what python provides is a way to use the above in class definition i.e Basically when creating a class the default parameter for the argument is the class and we don't want that so we modify that by using the we created earlier as the argument for so therefore the class will be create with the . metaclass type custom_class_type metaclass User custom_class_type Conclusion And that’s all! You just learned the basics of meta-classes using python.Thanks for following along! If you liked this, give this story a couple of reactions so more people can see it! If you LOVED this, buy me a something :) and don't forget to comment if you have questions or anything. You can contact me by email kennethgabriel78@gmail.com. Thanks for your time bye for now :).
