What is "self"?

[Terry Hancock]

On Friday 23 September 2005 07:11 am, Rick Wotnaz wrote:
> I've long thought that Guido missed an opportunity by not choosing 
> to use 'i' as the instance identifier, and making it a reserved 
> word. For one thing, it would resonate with the personal pronoun 
> 'I', and so carry essentially the same meaning as 'self'. It could 
> also be understood as an initialism for 'instance'. And, because it 
> is shorter, the number of objections to its existence *might* have 
> been smaller than seems to be the case with 'self' as the 
> convention.
> 
> And as a side benefit, it would make it impossible to use as a loop 
> index a language feature that would be a huge selling point among a 
> lot of experienced programmers. 

How exactly is that?  Anybody who uses "i" as a variable name for
anything other than an innermost loop index is a sick and twisted
code sadist.

You'd prefer what? "count" or "kount" or "i_am_an_innermost_loop_index_counter".
I mean "explicit is better than implicit", right?

Maybe Fortran warped my brain, but I just don't see the benefit here.
--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com