Ah, gotcha. But I don’t think that that’s actually a difference—it’s just a slig...

eesmith · on Dec 24, 2020

I agree.

I'm pretty sure the word "class" here comes from the repr for types, in Objects/typeobject.c :

  static PyObject *
  type_repr(PyTypeObject *type)
  {
    ...
      if (mod != NULL && !_PyUnicode_EqualToASCIIId(mod, &PyId_builtins))
          rtn = PyUnicode_FromFormat("<class '%U.%U'>", mod, name);
      else
        rtn = PyUnicode_FromFormat("<class '%s'>", type->tp_name);
    ...

which is used later on when defining the "type" type:

  PyTypeObject PyType_Type = {
      PyVarObject_HEAD_INIT(&PyType_Type, 0)
      "type",                                     /* tp_name */
       ...
      (reprfunc)type_repr,                        /* tp_repr */

That is, Python 3 has no actual "class" type, so it's not correct to say that '"type" is an instance of "class."'

(I could be wrong - I'm no expert at the Python internals.)