astral orange wrote:
As for the "class Name():" example above? Even though I haven't seen exactly what purpose 'self' serves
In many other programming language, self (or this, or Me) refers the the current class instance. In some languages, you can refer to an instance attribute without an explicit self, this, or Me; the name resolver will search in the local namespace (method-level), instance namespace (instance-level), class namespace (class-level), perhaps module level namespace (file-level), and finally global (application level).
Python interpreter is simple and stupid. It doesn't have many smarts; instead of having such a sophisticated name resolver, the compiler passes an argument to the function, making `self` a local variable that refers to the current instance.
Python programmers accesses instance and class namespace by explicitly referring to `self`; the name resolver only have two places to lookup names: local namespace (method level) and global namespace (module-level [!] not application level in python).
This choice of design simplifies the name resolver, simplifies method/function object design (since it does not need any code to handle an otherwise implicit self), and completely eliminates ambiguity (to the programmer) when having a local variable with the same name as an instance variable. Among many other advantages.
The side-effect of this design choice is self must be explicitly referenced to access class/instance attributes; unlike in some other language where self/this/Me may be omitted when it doesn't clash with other variable in local namespace.
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