too many self

[Alex Martelli]

aurora <aurora00 at gmail.com> wrote:
   ...
> I'm not making any serious criticism on the language or how it should do
> name binding. I'm ranting about having to attach a prefix to names often
> make simple things look complicated. An annoyance when it has to be done
> very often. You got the point?

No.  If you had to "attach a prefix", it might perhaps be a problem.
But, in Python, you don't have to do any such thing.  You use bare names
for locals, globals, and built-ins, and compound names for attributes of
objects.  How can it "make simple things look complicated" to use a
compound name for an object attribute?  It indicates exactly what's
going on: you're accessing or rebinding an attribute -- no more, no
less.  Just like, e.g., x[i] is how you refer to an item of x, so is
x.foo how you refer to an attribute of x.

If what you mean to say (as opposed to what you actually wrote) is to
support some kind of 'with' or 'using' statement, such as:

with glek[idx]:
    .total += .partial
    .partial = current_time
    .laps += 1

so that several accesses to, and rebindings of, attributes of the same
object, can be compactly and conveniently indicated, that, of course, is
quite a different issue, which has often been discussed in the past,
both here and on python-dev.  Yet there isn't even a PEP for it, yet, I
believe -- a bad sign: it suggests nobody is keen enough on it to
summarize the case for and against and nail down the specs.  I guess the
problem is that if you see this as equivalent to, say:

_ = glek[idx]:
_.total += _.partial
_.partial = current_time
_.laps += 1

it's not all that clear that the with notation is buying you all that
much -- visually distinguishing that current_time is not an attribute
name is about as hard in both cases, for example, maybe a bit harder if
the hypothetical new construct were in use... and without said
hypothetical new construct you have a better chance to make your code
clearer by using a visually distinguished name rather than a notation
which appears to try to HIDE the crucial issue of which name are bare
ones, and which names are compound!

Richer semantics for 'with'/'using' are of course possible, but harder
to pin down in detail, and even more controversial.  Still, until
somebody DOES care enough, for or against, to come up with a PEP, rather
than rants on this NG, nothing much is going to happen re this idea.


Alex