Being forced to pass an object itself when calling class methods - am I doing it wrong?

Question

If I made some sort of function like this:

class Counter:
    def __init__(self):
        self._count = 0

    def count(self) -> int:
        self._count += 1
        return self._count

    def reset(self) -> None:
        self._count = 0

and put this in the python shell:

>>> s = Counter
>>> s.count()

I end up with this:

TypeError: count() missing 1 required positional argument: 'self'

Am I doing something wrong? I don't understand why I would have to pass an object itself for its own method. I thought that it is automatically passed because I access the method using the period. At least this is how (I remember, perhaps incorrectly) it being in C++ so it doesn't make sense to me that this would this way in python. Am I doing something wrong?

Basically, why do I need to pass it s.count(s) rather than just do s.count(). Shouldn't self already initialize to the variable before the period?

Answer 1

s = Counter

This doesn't create an instance of the Counter class. It assigns the Counter class to the variable s. This means that you're trying to call an instance method on the class itself in the second line.

If you want to create an instance of the Counter class, you should write:

s = Counter()