Roy Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> Ron Adam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> You can actually call it anything you want but "self" is sort >> of a tradition. > > That's true, but I think needs to be said a bit more > emphatically. There's no reason to call it anything other than > "self" and a newcomer to the language would be well advised to > not try and be creative here. Using "self" is virtually > universal, and calling it anything else will just lead to > confusion by other people who have to read your code. I've long thought that Guido missed an opportunity by not choosing to use 'i' as the instance identifier, and making it a reserved word. For one thing, it would resonate with the personal pronoun 'I', and so carry essentially the same meaning as 'self'. It could also be understood as an initialism for 'instance'. And, because it is shorter, the number of objections to its existence *might* have been smaller than seems to be the case with 'self' as the convention. And as a side benefit, it would make it impossible to use as a loop index a language feature that would be a huge selling point among a lot of experienced programmers. -- rzed -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
