Re: [Python-ideas] PEP: Shorthand Symbol for "self"

Brandon Mintern wrote:

The more characters available, the more expressive the names can be,

Also the more confusing they can be. It's bearable in Lisp because there are very few characters that have special meaning to the parser, and most symbols are set off by whitespace or parentheses. But in Python, most punctuation is syntactically special, and names are set off by operators at least as often as whitespace. So allowing just a few randomly-chosen punctuation chars as part of names would be confusing, I think. I find that Ruby code with ! and ? in variable names trips up my visual parser, for example. I see something like set! and it looks like the name 'set' followed by a '!' operator. -- Greg