at roughly the same timestatic and class methodsdecoratorsand more many of the changes and feature additions of new-style classes integrate with the notion of subclassable types mentioned earlier in this because subclassable types and new-style classes were introduced in conjunction with merging of the type/class dichotomy in python and beyond as we've seenin xthis merging is completeclasses are now typesand types are classesand python classes today still reflect both that conceptual merging and its implementation along with these changespython also grew more coherent and generalized protocol for coding metaclasses--classes that subclass the type objectintercept class creation callsand may provide behavior acquired by classes accordinglythey provide welldefined hook for management and augmentation of class objects they are also an advanced topic that is optional for most python programmersso we'll postpone further details here we'll glimpse metaclasses again later in this in conjunction with class decorators-- feature whose roles often overlap--but we'll postpone their full coverage until in the final part of this book for our purpose herelet' move on to handful of additional class-related extensions static and class methods as of python it is possible to define two kinds of methods within class that can be called without an instancestatic methods work roughly like simple instance-less functions inside classand class methods are passed class instead of an instance both are similar to tools in other languages ( +static methodsalthough this feature was added in conjunction with the new-style classes discussed in the prior sectionsstatic and class methods work for classic classes too to enable these method modesyou must call special built-in functions named staticmethod and classmethod within the classor invoke them with the special @name decoration syntax we'll meet later in this these functions are required to enable these special method modes in python xand are generally needed in in python xa staticmethod declaration is not required for instance-less methods called only through class namebut is still required if such methods are called through instances why the special methodsas we've learneda class' method is normally passed an instance object in its first argumentto serve as the implied subject of the method call--that' the "objectin "object-oriented programming todaythoughthere are two ways to modify this model before explain what they arei should explain why this might matter to you sometimesprograms need to process data associated with classes instead of instances consider keeping track of the number of instances created from classor maintaining advanced class topics