On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Robert Dailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Given the code samples above, is there any technical reason why this cannot > be done? Thanks for the input guys, and thanks more over for keeping this > easy-going. > > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > Well, the linked thread gives many reasons, but as mentioned it is a flamewar thread. Philosophically python is not an "object oriented" language per say, it has an object system, a not bolted on one I might add, but it doesn't force developers to use that methodology. You can be functional or procedural if you'd rather. Following this philosophy, when methods were designed, they were merely functions that got passed an instance as the first argument. The parser followed this design choice. As far as I understand it, the underlying method object is not different from a function argument, thus it cannot have any magic arguments built in. The only magic involved is the fact that the object, when calling a method, will pass its instance as the first argument. I don't believe there is any chance of this changing in python 3, python 4 is anyone's guess... This does allow some good things that come for free, like adding methods later, or changing functions into methods or methods into functions. If you start out developing a class, but feel a class is too bulky, you can delete the "class" line, dedent the methods, and have a set of functions instead for free. Or, if you have functions that are set up to take instances as their first argument already, you can bundle them up into a class very easily. If by "hack" you mean using features already available in the language to accomplish things, that kind of is what it is, and that's kind of what python is about. New syntax for a new feature is uncommon, but it happens. New syntax that breaks old code is very uncommon, and is only now coming out in python 3. And the biggest change in python 3 is to eliminate added syntax, such as print being a statement, and make the code reuse more python features rather than have every feature exist as an island. Print being a function, for instance, lets you use the same syntax for it that you use for other functions, making everything clearer and more unified. A common thing programmers might do when upgrading their code is to turn print statements into better logging functions - if print was a function in the first place this would be an easier task. Eliminating self doesn't accomplish much, and changes of this nature just don't get done without a good reason. It takes away something that might be annoying, but doesn't add anything. The benefits of changing have to be significant for a code change to break the existing syntax. Many people are upset even about some of the changes in python 3, that the benefits don't outweight the cost of change, and most of those changes are less damaging than playing around with the self businss would be :) So no, self not a mysterious thing that we should never question. Self is an understood thing that has been questioned very often (weekly, monthly) for many many years - there are not enough good reasons to bother with changing it, and there enough good reasons for it that it's best to keep it.
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