Russ P. wrote:
Python already uses shorthand extensively. How about "def"? For people who are so worried about self-explanatory symbols, what the heck does that stand for? Default? Defeat? Defect? Defunct? Defer?
I think the difference here is that those other abbreviations are mostly fairly standard. The "def" keyword is the same in Ruby, and similar enough to "define" or "defun" in Scheme or LISP. The "!=" operator is pretty much standard across nearly all languages. What is being proposed with "$" here though, would be different from how it is used anywhere else and would be confusing.
Moreover, I especially don't like proposing to eliminate as well in this instance the "dot notation", which is standard in nearly all object oriented languages. Using something as a substitute for "self" is one thing, and you can mostly use what you like there now, as "self" is more a convention than a requirement. But the "dot" that belongs there is critical to understanding, you can't hide that to save one keystroke.
Getting back to Guido's suggestion, though, I think it makes some sense. Being new to Python, I did find myself occasionally forgetting "self" in instance methods. But, I also thought the requirement to include it was helpful in reminding me what was really going on there, that I was creating an instance method which was really a function that wouldn't actually be created until the instance was initiated. I tend to think this may be clearer though using the dot notation rather than passing the instance variable as a parameter.
I'm not sure though whether allowing both syntaxes would make things more or less confusing. It might actually be helpful in some respects for newcomers to realize that self.method(arg) is somewhat the same as method(self, arg). Perhaps I'm wrong on this, I don't fully understand yet what is going on under the hood, but it seems to me that that would be part of the glue that allows Python to be so multi-paradigm; much of the difference between OOP and procedural or functional is just different syntax for the same thing.
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