The Python Coding Stack: And Now You Know Your ABC

The author discusses creating a system to manage track and field event results, starting with `Athlete` and `Event` classes. To efficiently access athletes by bib number, a dictionary is used. The `Event` class initially includes methods for adding results and finalizing them by sorting based on performance, but this approach fails for field events where larger values are better. To address this, the author proposes creating separate `TrackEvent` and `FieldEvent` classes, both inheriting from a common `Event` class. To prevent direct instantiation of the `Event` class, it is converted into an Abstract Base Class (ABC) using the `abc` module. Subclasses of the ABC are required to implement the `finalise_results` method, ensuring proper sorting logic for track and field events. The `TrackEvent` class sorts results in ascending order while `FieldEvent` class sorts in descending order. This ensures correct ranking based on the event type.