Rick Wotnaz wrote: > 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.
And an annoyance to others. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list