newbie: self.member syntax seems /really/ annoying

[Michele Simionato]

On Sep 12, 4:43 pm, Charles Fox <charles.... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks guys -- yeah these two stategies (short s.varname; and explicit
> rescoping, a=self.a etc) are more or less what I was using.  That's
> still kind of annoying though.
>
> The s.varname approach still makes numerical code much harder to read.
>
> I had a nasty bug with the boilerplate approach when forgetting to
> reassign some of the variables back to members (self.a=a).  And that's
> a lot of boilerplate you need -- I thought the python way was to
> minimize redundant code?  (Ditching header files and curley brackets
> was a main reason for me coming here).

You still can play with dictionaries, for instance:

def __init__(self, a, b, c):
   vars(self).update(locals())

correspond to

self.a = a
self.b = b
self.c = c

(and actually also to self.self =self).

> I see the argument for making self explicit -- what would be wrong
> with just .a instead of self.a though?  That's still explicit but much
> easier to read.  (I think I've seen that somewhere else, is it C#?)

This has been proposed many times. But self is handy because you can
give
a different name to it: for instance it becomes cls when you are
inside a classmethod.


    Michele Simionato