Reasoning behind 'self' parameter in classes?

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Brett g Porter:
> Fredrik Lundh has written a  very clear explanation of this athttp://effbot.org/pyfaq/why-must-self-be-used-explicitly-in-method-de...

Today lot of people know that Ruby exists, so such FAQ explanation
must explain why Python doesn't use a shorter syntax like for example
@foo to denote instance attributes (and maybe @@baz for the class
attributes).

Bye,
bearophile