Special Methods
All the built-in datatypes consist of some data and a collection of special object methods. The names of special methods are always preceded and followed by double underscores (_ _). These methods are automatically triggered by the interpreter as a program executes. For example, the operation x + y is mapped to an internal method x ._ _add_ _ (y ), and an indexing operation x [k ] is mapped to x ._ _getitem_ _ (k ). The behavior of each datatype depends entirely on the set of special methods that it implements.
Although it’s not possible to alter the behavior of built-in types (or even to invoke any of their special methods directly by name, as just suggested), it’s possible to use class definitions to define new objects that ...
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