title: Why return nothing in class method?
body: <p>I've recently started working at a company doing work in Python, and in their code they have a class which defines a handful of functions that do nothing, and return nothing. Code that is pretty much exactly </p>
  
  <pre><code>...
  ...
  def foo(self):
      return
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm really confused as to why anyone would do that, and my manager is not around for me to ask. Would one do this for the sake of abstraction for child classes? A signal that the function will be overridden in the future? The class I'm looking at in particular inherits from a base class that does not contain any of the functions that are returning nothing, so I know that at least this class isn't doing some kind of weird function overriding.</p>