On Aug 31, 5:35 pm, "T. Goodchild" <tgoodch...@gmail.com> wrote: > I’m new to Python, and I love it. The philosophy of the language (and > of the community as a whole) is beautiful to me. > > But one of the things that bugs me is the requirement that all class > methods have 'self' as their first parameter. On a gut level, to me > this seems to be at odds with Python’s dedication to simplicity. > > For example, consider Python’s indent-sensitive syntax. Although > other languages didn’t use indentation to specify scope, programmers > always used indentation anyways. Making indentation took a common > practice, made it a rule, and the result was a significantly improved > signal-to-noise ratio in the readability of Python code. > > So why is 'self' necessary on class methods? It seems to me that the > most common practice is that class methods *almost always* operate on > the instance that called them. It would make more sense to me if this > was assumed by default, and for "static" methods (methods that are > part of a class, but never associated with a specific instance) to be > labelled instead. > > Just curious about the rationale behind this part of the language.
It's required to make distinction between objects inside the calss and outside of it. Seems pretty logical to me. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
