what is the idiom for copy lots of params into self?

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Emin:
> This saves a lot of code and makes it easier to see what is going on,
> but it seems like there should be a better idiom for this task. Any
> suggestions?

I know two ways of doing it, one way requires very light code into the
__init__ and it uses a decorator that takes the parameters and updates
self, but I have seen it's not much reliable in the implementation I
have.
The other way requires a bit more code into the method, but the
function code is quite short, easy to understand, and it seems reliable
enough (code from web.py, a bit modified):

def selfassign(self, locals):
    for key, value in locals.iteritems():
        if key != 'self':
            setattr(self, key, value)

Used on the first line as:

def __init__(self, foo, bar, baz=1):
    selfassign(self, locals())

Bye,
bearophile