Edward Elliott wrote:
> 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.
Nope. It's the MethodType object (a descriptor) that wraps the function
that do the job. The object itself is totally unaware of this.
> 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
There's no mismatch at this level. The arguments passed to the *function
*object wrapped by the method actually matches the *function* signature.
> 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.
I do agree that the error message is really unhelpful for newbies (now I
don't know how difficult/costly it would be to correct this).
> Making people pass 'self'
s/self/the instance/
> explicitly is stupid
No. It's actually a feature.
> because it always has to be
> the first argument, leading to these kinds of mistakes. The compiler
> should handle it for you
I don't think this would be possible if we want to keep the full
dynamism of Python. How then could the compiler handle the following code ?
class MyObj(object):
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name
def someFunc(obj):
try:
print obj.name
except AttributeError:
print "obj %s has no name" % obj
import types
m = MyObj('parrot')
m.someMeth = types.MethodType(someFunc, obj, obj.__class__)
m.someMeth()
> - 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,
s/may be/are/
> but in practice you don't declare
> self as a parameter to module functions
def someOtherFunc():
print "hello there"
m.someFunc = someOtherFunc
m.someFunc()
--
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.split('@')])"
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