No, it's perfectly fine to insist on complete clarity. That's what good coding is all about.

The disable function needs to be a part of the class because you want it to be something that only DisablerButtons can do. AND, you want each DisablerButton to have its own copy of disable(), so that it can disable its own target.

If you made disable() a public function, outside the class scope, then there would be no easy way to tell disable which target to disable.

But since each DisablerButton has its own copy of the disable() method, the problem is solved: disable operates on self.target.

The reason for the syntax

self.disable

instead of

disable(self)

is that a method is always written in terms of its parent. Try this:

'hi there'.reverse()

Semantically, Python turns 'self.method(arg1, arg2)'

into 'method(self,arg1,arg2)'. But the distinction is made syntactically between the parent (self) and the other arguments so that humans can read it more clearly.

The Button.__init__() line is needed because DisablerButton inherits its properties and methods from Button. Normally, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes when a Button widget is created. All of this occurs in the __init__ method of Button. So DisablerButton calls Button.__init__ to make sure that all of those things happen, like construction of the widget, attachment to mainw, things like that that you don't want to worry about.

Bottom line: it's usually a good idea for children to call the parent's __init__ method.

Hope it helps, and I'll think about the radiobutton problem later.

Jeff