Attack a sacred Python Cow

[Kay Schluehr]

On 25 Jul., 03:01, Terry Reedy <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:
> Torsten Bronger wrote:
> > Hallöchen!
>
>   > And why does this make the implicit insertion of "self" difficult?
>
> > I could easily write a preprocessor which does it after all.
>
> class C():
>    def f():
>      a = 3
>
> Inserting self into the arg list is trivial.  Mindlessly deciding
> correctly whether or not to insert 'self.' before 'a' is impossible when
> 'a' could ambiguously be either an attribute of self or a local variable
> of f.  Or do you and/or Jordan plan to abolish local variables for methods?
>
> tjr

This isn't the problem Jordan tries to address. It's really just about
`self` in the argument signature of f, not about its omission in the
body. Some problems occur when not `self` shall be used but e.g.
`this`. Here one has to specify more:

class C():
    __self__ = 'this'   # use `this` instead of `self`
    def f(a):
        this.a = a

or

class C():
    def f($this, a):    # use `this` instead of `self`
        this.a = a

When an $-prefixed parameter is found the automatic insertion of
`self` will be blocked and the $-prefixed parameter name will be used
instead but without the prefix.