Two minor syntactic proposals

[phil hunt]

On Sun, 17 Jun 2001 01:53:43 +0100, Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com> wrote:
>You can do it, thus:
>
>    def new_method(self, x):
>        something_else()
>        return x+1
>    Thing.new_method = new_method
>
>but that's rather ugly.

It doesn't look too bad to me. It's not as if you'd be doing it 
every day, I expect. And i don't think special syntax for 
operations your rarely use is a good idea -- because people
will use them too infrequently to remember the syntax.

>Every now and then we get people complaining because it's
>too easy for them to forget to include a "self" argument
>in a method definition. Every now and then, I suspect that
>most Pythonistas forget. (I certainly do.) Suppose there
>were an alternative syntax, thus:
>
>    class Thing:
>        def self.boring_method():
>            return 0

I propose a different way of doing this: make 'self' implied in all
references to instance variables. This involves definiing 2 new keywords,
qclass and insvars. So:

   qclass Thing:
      insvar v, w
      def myMethod(p):
         print p, v, x
      def otherMethod():
         myMethod(1)
         someFunction()

would be equivalent to:

   class Thing:
      def myMethod(self, p):
         print p, self.v, x
      def otherMethod(self):
         self.myMethod(1)
         someFunction()    

Note that a qclass definition would have to know what its methods and instance
variables were, including those inherited from superclasses, for this to work.
Is this feasible?

Another thing i would like is multi-line comments. I know you can do this
with documentation strings, but |i find them too limiting, because you 
are only allowed to put thme in certain places, and indenting rules
apply to them. I would like to be able to, in a file:


#/*
comment for MyFirstClass
...
#*/
class MyFirstClass:
   ...definition...

#/*
comment for MySecondClass
...
#*/
class MySecondClass:
    ...definition... 



-- 
##  Philip Hunt                   ##
##  philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk  ##