I noticed the same question on c.l.p that Steve Ferg responded to on his blog. I was feeling too lazy to respond to the thread earlier but I thought I'd throw my idea up on the ol' blog before wrapping up for the day.

I think this is a classic use-case for class methods. Here is my implementation.

class Vector(object): def __init__(self, x, y, z): self.x = x self.y = y self.z = z @classmethod def from_sequence(cls, sequence): return cls(*sequence) @classmethod def from_vector(cls, vec): return cls(vec.x, vec.y, vec.z) def __repr__(self): return "Vector(%s, %s, %s)" % (self.x, self.y, self.z) if __name__ == '__main__': print Vector(1,2,3) print Vector.from_sequence([4,5,6]) print Vector.from_sequence((7,8,9)) v = Vector(10, 11, 12) print Vector.from_vector(v);

Here is the output from running the script:

Vector(1, 2, 3) Vector(4, 5, 6) Vector(7, 8, 9) Vector(10, 11, 12)

I like the classmethod route because it is obvious what the code is doing, it makes it easy to add new from_\* methods and keeps the general __init__ method clean.

cw