get a self data in a method call

[Erik Max Francis]

Sean Ross wrote:

> # here's a shorter, if less obvious, version
> def func(self, data = None):
>            data = data or self.data

This is a bad idea, in my opinion.  Depending on the values you rightly
expect to pass in for data, this can have unintended side effects, since
it prevents you from passing in any data that evaluates to false (or,
rather, if you do so, you'll get the results of self.data instead). 
That includes 0, 0.0, 0L, (), [], {}, and an instance of a custom type
which has overloaded __nonzero__ to return something false.

-- 
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