Understanding Python super with init methods

Question

I'm trying to understand the use of super(). From the looks of it, both child classes can be created, just fine.
I'm curious to know about the actual difference between the following 2 child classes.
class Base(object):
    def __init__(self):
    print "Base created"
class ChildA(Base):
    def __init__(self):
    Base.__init__(self)
class ChildB(Base):
    def __init__(self):
    super(ChildB, self).__init__() 
ChildA() 
ChildB()

Answer 1

It's been noted that in Python 3.0+ you can use

super().__init__()

to make your call, which is concise and does not require you to reference the parent OR class names explicitly, which can be handy. I just want to add that for Python 2.7 or under, it is possible to get this name-insensitive behaviour by writing self.__class__ instead of the class name, i.e.

super(self.__class__, self).__init__()

HOWEVER, this breaks calls to super for any classes that inherit from your class, where self.__class__ could return a child class. For example:

class Polygon(object): 
    def __init__(self, id): 
        self.id = id 
class Rectangle(Polygon): 
    def __init__(self, id, width, height): 
        super(self.__class__, self).__init__(id) 
        self.shape = (width, height) 
class Square(Rectangle): 
    pass

Here I have a class Square, which is a sub-class of Rectangle. Say I don't want to write a separate constructor for Square because the constructor for Rectangle is good enough, but for whatever reason I want to implement a Square so I can reimplement some other method.