Method binding confusion

[David MacQuigg]

On Mon, 24 May 2004 17:21:07 -0700, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu>
wrote:

>Whether or not there should be an implied self or not, is a value 
>judgement.  Guido (and everyone else who works on the core Python 
>language) has heard your (and everyone else's) arguments before.

I've seen some of the discussions in searching the archives, but what
I have seen misses the point about unification and goes overboard on
matters of personal preference.  I agree that using an explicit 'self'
in the body of the method is a personal preference call that only GvR
can make, and I've tried to steer around this issue.  Unfortunately,
because my suggestion requires taking 'self' out of the first
argument, there is an automatic reaction -- oh we've heard that
before, another "self hater".

>I would put good odds on there not likely to be /any/ sort of change 
>toward what you are advocating (the merging of functions and methods) in 
>the forseeable future (before Python 3.0) in standard Python.  And even 
>in the far future (Python 3.0), there is no guarantee.

This *is* a Python 3 proposal.  No way we can make it backward
compatible with Python 2.  My focus instead has been on making the
changes "migratable" -- that is, we *must* have the ability to
automatically translate existing Python programs to the new syntax.
These are minor improvements in the language, and no such improvement
would be worth the loss of ten years development in Python.

-- Dave