Why self?

[Brian Quinlan]

Louis M. Pecora wrote:
> > If the explicit self argument were removed, what would you add to
the
> > language to differentiate between local and instance variables?
> >
> 
> Here's a stab.
> 
> (1) All self variables have to be initialized in __init__.  That's
just
> good practice anyway.  They are labeled with self in __init__
otherwise
> they are local.

This would be ugly and slow. The slowness would come from the fact that
locally scoped variables could not be identified during compilation.

Cheers,
Brian