I guess you also would do:
foo = 1
isinstance(foo,object)
and not
foo = 1
foo.isinstance(object)

On the other hand, I haven’t used Python enough to really be in any position to criticise the language or it’s constructs.

>>> type(1)

>>> issubclass(int,object)
True
>>> isinstance(1,object)
True
>>> dir(1)
[’__abs__’, ‘__add__’, ‘__and__’, ‘__class__’, ‘__cmp__’, ‘__coerce__’, ‘__delattr__’, ‘__div__’, ‘__divmod__’, ‘__doc__’, ‘__float__’, ‘__floordiv__’, ‘__getattribute__’, ‘__getnewargs__’, ‘__hash__’, ‘__hex__’, ‘__init__’, ‘__int__’, ‘__invert__’, ‘__long__’, ‘__lshift__’, ‘__mod__’, ‘__mul__’, ‘__neg__’, ‘__new__’, ‘__nonzero__’, ‘__oct__’, ‘__or__’, ‘__pos__’, ‘__pow__’, ‘__radd__’, ‘__rand__’, ‘__rdiv__’, ‘__rdivmod__’, ‘__reduce__’, ‘__reduce_ex__’, ‘__repr__’, ‘__rfloordiv__’, ‘__rlshift__’, ‘__rmod__’, ‘__rmul__’, ‘__ror__’, ‘__rpow__’, ‘__rrshift__’, ‘__rshift__’, ‘__rsub__’, ‘__rtruediv__’, ‘__rxor__’, ‘__setattr__’, ‘__str__’, ‘__sub__’, ‘__truediv__’, ‘__xor__’]
>>> class myint(int):
… def __add__(self,other):
… return int.__add__(self,other)+1
…
>>> a = myint(5)
>>> a + 1
7
>>> b = myint(5)
>>> a + b
11
>>> str(abs(-a))
‘5′

Back in 1991 Python was not object oriented, and every thing was not an object, but hey, it was in 1991. Python has since evolved and has a fully object oriented structure since 2002 and the Python 2.2 release (of course, object orientation was there before but there was a difference between ‘types’ and ‘classes’).