Metaclasses?

[GTE]

Andrew Cooke <andrew at andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk> wrote in message
news:8e937n$f4p$1 at nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <3906542D.62B94F17 at darmstadt.gmd.de>,
>   Robb Shecter <shecter at darmstadt.gmd.de> wrote:
> > Michael Hudson wrote:
> [...]
> > Choice A:  Have a smalltalk-like instance variable declaration.
> [...]
> > to say that I like "Choice A".  I come from Java, and it did bug me a
> > bit that there was no one easy place to see what instance variables a
> > class has.  It made understanding the XML parser source code harder,
> for
> > example.
>
> this doesn't really save typing - instead of typing self you have to
> type the local declaration.  worse, this introduces extra syntax (after
> all, you still need ".").
>
> but more importantly, having "self" is good for the soul.  in most other
> languages objects function in some "magical" manner.  having self makes
> the mechanism clear - which is helpful both to newbies understanding OOP
> for the first time, and to fools like me that get easily confused when
> things happen behind their back...
>
> andrew
>
> ps it doesn't have to be "self", afaik - you could use just "s" to save
> key presses.... :-)

Not to mention that most C++ coding standards require usage of 'm_' as a member
variable prefix, so if you shorten 'self.' to 's.' (or, even, 'm.'), you'd have
to do exactly the same amount of typing.

On the other hand I kinda like Visual Basic's 'with' construct. Consider:
def method(self,arg1,arg2):
    with self:
        .spam = "spam"
        .eggs = arg1+arg2

Actually, for class methods that 'with ...:' could be <gasp> implicit.

Vadim