Thanks guys -- yeah these two stategies (short s.varname; and explicit rescoping, a=self.a etc) are more or less what I was using. That's still kind of annoying though.
The s.varname approach still makes numerical code much harder to read. I had a nasty bug with the boilerplate approach when forgetting to reassign some of the variables back to members (self.a=a). And that's a lot of boilerplate you need -- I thought the python way was to minimize redundant code? (Ditching header files and curley brackets was a main reason for me coming here). I see the argument for making self explicit -- what would be wrong with just .a instead of self.a though? That's still explicit but much easier to read. (I think I've seen that somewhere else, is it C#?) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
