Proposal for removing self

[Alex Martelli]

Andrea Griffini <agriff at tin.it> wrote:

> On 25 Aug 2004 22:23:46 -0700, rattan at cps.cmich.edu (Ishwar Rattan)
> wrote:
> 
> >I concur for keeping self intact, it does provide clarity in code writing
> >and reading.
> 
> I remember Alex Martelli advocating in our italian newsgroup on
> C++ that C++ programmers should use "this->..." everywhere :-)

I did that, and I did that before becoming mad with love for Python.

At the time my main job was helping hundreds of other programmers debug
their hairiest bugs (also helping them architect and design and test
things correctly, but debugging took far more time -- there's never time
to do it right so there's always time to do it over) and the lack of
this-> was a major cause of problems. confusions and bugs.

> Seemed crazy to me at that time, but now after giving a try
> to python I've to say that self-consciousness isn't bad.

If you write and debug truly complicated C++ templates you'll see why I
wanted explicit this-> prefixing most ardently...;-).


Alex