[Tutor] Methods and classes

Kent Johnson kent37 at tds.net
Thu Sep 14 00:26:53 CEST 2006


Chris Hengge wrote:
> The deitel book has a note on page 229:
> 	Failure to specify an object reference (usually called self) as the
> first parameter in a method definition causes fatal logic errors when
> the method is invoked at runt-ime.
> 
> Now I've got methods all over the place among several scripts that don't
> use self, and each other works fine as I'd expect. 

You have to distinguish between a method (a function that is part of a 
class definition) and a standalone function (not part of any class). 
Python allows both. Standalone functions don't have a 'self' parameter; 
class methods always do (you can give it a different name but if you 
omit it you will get a runtime error when you call the method).

Kent



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