Why does python has so many magic methods if any magic method could be defined to do anything?

Answer 1

You can always use the tools you have to do damage. It's your responsibility as a programmer that you don't.

Basically, 'magic method' is just a fancy name for operator overload - or maybe builtin syntax overload or something like that.

(Whatever you call it, it's a mouthful. ;-))

You don't have to use these tools for the most part, but you can whenever you think it makes sense.

Let's say, you have a class LegoPiece, and you want to create behavior making them connect.

You could define a method 'add', or 'connect' or whatever. Then you'd have to write something like:

piece3 = piece1.connect(piece2)

You *could* also define the magic method __add__ for it, which is overloading the plus operator.

That way you can write:

piece3 = piece1+piece2