Holger wrote: > oops, that was kinda embarrassing. It's really not. You got a completely unhelpful error message saying you passed 2 args when you only passed one explicitly. The fact the b is also an argument to b.addfile(f) is totally nonobvious until you know that 1) b is an object not a module*, and 2) objects pass references to themselves as the first argument to their methods. The syntax "b." is completely different from the syntax of any other type of parameter.
The mismatch between the number of parameters declared in the method signature and the number of arguments actually passed is nonobvious, unintuitive, and would trip up anybody who didn't already know what was going on. It's ugly and confusing. It's definitely a wart on the langauge. Making people pass 'self' explicitly is stupid because it always has to be the first argument, leading to these kinds of mistakes. The compiler should handle it for you - and no, explicit is not *always* better than implicit, just often and perhaps usually. While it's easy to recognize once you know what's going on, that doesn't make it any less of a wart. * technically modules may be objects also, but in practice you don't declare self as a parameter to module functions -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
