FEEDBACK WANTED: Type/class unification

[Christian Tanzer]

"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at acm.org> wrote:

> Hernan M. Foffani <hfoffani at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > One minor suggestion:
> > I think it would help if you set a convention for the name
> > of the first argument in classmethods. Like self for standard
> > methods. Well, even self can "work" here, too.
> 
> Guido:
> >I think 'self' would be confusing.  I'd like to propose 'cls'.
> 
> What's wrong with 'klass'?  Other than that it looks either
> like a typo or like German.  Several of the standard libraries
> use 'klass' when refering to a class and I've seen code outside
> the std. library using 'klass' as well.  Whereas 'cls' is less
> frequently used in the std. library to hold a class, but I've
> not seen external uses of that name for that purpose elsewhere.

`klass` is broken German <wink>. Might be correct Dutch, though. To me
it seems wrong to use a non-english token in a programming languages
using English for all other names.

There were lots of proposals for this, all of them contentious to
someone or another:

arg-name   pro                             con
--------------------------------------------------------------------
class      obvious meaning                 clash with keyword

Class      obvious meaning                 case sensitive

cls        BDFL's choice                   pronunciation, non-obvious

clas       closest to class                non-obvious

self       standard convention             confusion between instance
                                           and class methods

Self       follows a common convention     case sensitive
           (class name capitalized,   
           instance name lower case)

type       obvious meaning                 clash with builtin

cat        cute (class and type)           cute, non-obvious acronym


I'm glad that nobody proposed `class_` yet :-)

As the first argument can immediately signify a class method if the
same name is used by everybody it would be nice if an uncontentious
name popped up. 

-- 
Christian Tanzer                                         tanzer at swing.co.at
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