Question

If I have a class of the following format:

class TestClass:
  def __init__(self):
    self.value = 0

  def getNewObject(self):
    return TestClass()

Is there a limitation to the amount of times I can call the function? For example:

obj = TestClass()
obj.getNewObject().getNewObject()

Is there a limitation to how many times I can call getNewObject() on the return value of getNewObject()? If so what factors affect this?

Answer 1

I doubt it. One reason that makes me doubt it is that if we have this function:

def test(obj):
    obj.getNewObject().getNewObject().getNewObject()

And we disassemble it:

import dis
dis.dis(test)

We get this:

  2           0 LOAD_FAST                0 (obj)
              3 LOAD_ATTR                0 (getNewObject)
              6 CALL_FUNCTION            0
              9 LOAD_ATTR                0 (getNewObject)
             12 CALL_FUNCTION            0
             15 LOAD_ATTR                0 (getNewObject)
             18 CALL_FUNCTION            0
             21 POP_TOP             
             22 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
             25 RETURN_VALUE        

That’s just repetitions of LOAD_ATTR followed by CALL_FUNCTION. I can’t imagine that that would require much memory or other resources to manage. As such, there is probably no limit.