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I've tried searching online for this question but because the word "object" is so common I get lots of unrelated results instead of what I'm looking for. I also looked through the official docs here: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/classes.html and didn't find any explanation for this. So please don't freak out when you read this question.

Question:

In Python while declaring a new class we extend the object class. For ex:

class SomeClass(object):
    #eggs and ham etc

Here we notice that SomeClass has a capital S because we are following camel case. However, the class that we are inheriting from - "object" doesn't seem to follow this naming convention. Why is the object class in all lower case?

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4 Answers 4

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All Python's built-in types have lower case: int, str, unicode, float, bool, etc. The object type is just another one of these.

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3 Comments

object does look like a keyword. However, on searching a little more I came across this a class defaultdict inside the collections package. "defaultdict" is a class that extends the dict class. It's not a built-in and yet it's been declared in small letters. Isn't there something wrong here or are some Python classes really declared in lower cases?
@Mugen OrderedDict is written in camel case. The difference is in the Python version they appeared in: 2.5 for defaultdict and 2.7 for OrderedDict. I don't know if it is related...
@Mugen Btw this question is also covered in this answer.
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https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#class-names says:

Class Names

Class names should normally use the CapWords convention.

The naming convention for functions may be used instead in cases where the interface is documented and used primarily as a callable.

Note that there is a separate convention for builtin names: most builtin names are single words (or two words run together), with the CapWords convention used only for exception names and builtin constants. [emphasis mine]

All other classes should use the CapWorlds convention. As list, object, etc are built-in names, they follow this separate convention.

(copied from my answer to If the convention in Python is to capitalize classes, why then is list() not capitalized? Is it not a class?)

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3

If you go to the python interpreter and do this:

>>> object
<type 'object'>

You'll see object is a built-in type, the other built-in types in python are also lowercase type, int, bool, float, str, list, tuple, dict, .... For instance:

>>> type.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> object.__class__
<type 'type'>     
>>> int.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> type.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> int.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> bool.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> float.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> str.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> list.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> tuple.__class__
<type 'type'>
>>> dict.__class__
<type 'type'>

So it makes sense they are not lowercase, that way is quite easy to distinguish them from the other type of classes

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1 Comment

"You'll see object is a built-in type, not a class" types and classes are merged and technically a type is a class and a class is a type. There's a circular relationship in Python's model.
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The short and basic answer is, class is just a keyword used by the python interpreter to know when some thing needs to be seen as a class , like how you have "def" for defining a function. Its a keyword to describe what follows is all.

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3 Comments

The op is asking about object not class.
That's my bad, in that case Daniel's answer is better.
@BrandonJones Haha. After you came to know that you weren't answering the question, why didn't you delete your answer? I'm really curious to know what your thinking was here.

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