why python annoys me

[D-Man]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 01:40:53PM +0200, Martin von Loewis wrote:
| Luke <floods at netplus.net> writes:
| > 
| > Why do you always have to access class data members as self.* What a
| > pain in the ass, and anti-OO.
| 
| I disagree. In Smalltalk, which is one of the oldest OO languages, the
| object being dealt with is always referred-to as "self". Even in a
| natural language, the actor always refers to the subject of an action,
| even if the subject is the actor ("I understand this", not "Understand
| this").

Only in English.  In other languages (Spanish comes to mind, I don't
really know any others but AFAIK all Romance languages are identical
in this regard) the verb changes to indicate the subject.  I belive
this comes from the time (~1044 AD) when the Norman French invaded
England.  At that time the smart (rich) people spoke French while the
uneducated (poor) people spoke English.  As a result of the English
speakers being uneducated and spread out the language evolved to
become closer to slang and varied from region to region.  Sometime
after the french were no longer ruling the writers of the time began
to re-standardize the language.

I think that the functions should be named differently to indicate the
subject for each possible use of the function so the
compiler/interpreter will automatically know exactly which subject is
"self"/"this" <wink>.

-D