How do overridden method calls from base-class methods work?

Question

According to the docs on inheritance:

Derived classes may override methods of their base classes. Because methods have no special privileges when calling

Answer 1

To illustrate how it works consider these two classes:

class Parent(object):
    def eat(self):
        print("I don't want to eat that {}.".format(self.takefrompocket()))

    def takefrompocket(self):
        return 'apple'

    def __getattribute__(self, name):
        print('Looking for:', name)
        method_to_use = object.__getattribute__(self, name)
        print('Found method:', method_to_use)
        return method_to_use

class Child(Parent):
    def takefrompocket(self):
        return 'salad'

The __getattribute__ method is responsible in new-style-classes (like all classes in python3) for the attribute lookup. It is just implemented to print what each lookup does - normally you don't want to and shouldn't implement it yourself. The lookup follows pythons method resolution order (MRO) just if you are really interested.

>>> some_kid = Child()
>>> some_kid.eat()
Looking for: eat
Found method: >
Looking for: takefrompocket
Found method: >
I don't want to eat that salad.

So when you want to use eat then it uses Parent.eat in this example. But self.takefrompocket is used from Child.

>>> some_parent = Parent()
>>> some_parent.eat()
Looking for: eat
Found method: >
Looking for: takefrompocket
Found method: >
I don't want to eat that apple.

Here both methods are taken from Parent. Inherited classes don't (generally) interfere with their ancestors!