What is "self"?

[Jeff Schwab]

Rick Wotnaz wrote:
> Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote in
> news:roy-DE5389.07461923092005 at reader1.panix.com: 
> 
> 
>>Ron Adam <rrr at ronadam.com> wrote:
>>
>>>You can actually call it anything you want but "self" is sort
>>>of a tradition.
>>
>>That's true, but I think needs to be said a bit more
>>emphatically.  There's no reason to call it anything other than
>>"self" and a newcomer to the language would be well advised to
>>not try and be creative here.  Using "self" is virtually
>>universal, and calling it anything else will just lead to
>>confusion by other people who have to read your code. 
> 
> 
> I've long thought that Guido missed an opportunity by not choosing 
> to use 'i' as the instance identifier, and making it a reserved 
> word. For one thing, it would resonate with the personal pronoun 
> 'I', and so carry essentially the same meaning as 'self'. It could 
> also be understood as an initialism for 'instance'. And, because it 
> is shorter, the number of objections to its existence *might* have 
> been smaller than seems to be the case with 'self' as the 
> convention.
> 
> And as a side benefit, it would make it impossible to use as a loop 
> index a language feature that would be a huge selling point among a 
> lot of experienced programmers. 

And an annoyance to others.