Inheritance

18.4 Decks

Now that we have Cards, the next step is to define Decks. Since a deck is made up of cards, it is natural for each Deck to contain a list of cards as an attribute.

The following is a class definition for Deck. The init method creates the attribute cards and generates the standard set of fifty-two cards:

class Deck:

    def __init__(self):
        self.cards = []
        for suit in range(4):
            for rank in range(1, 14):
                card = Card(suit, rank)
                self.cards.append(card)

The easiest way to populate the deck is with a nested loop. The outer loop enumerates the suits from 0 to 3. The inner loop enumerates the ranks from 1 to 13. Each iteration creates a new Card with the current suit and rank, and appends it to self.cards.