Use empty string for self

[John Salerno]

Roy Smith wrote:
> paullanier at gmail.com wrote:
>> Any comments?  Has this been discussed before?
> 
> Yes.  To death.  Executive summary: self is here to stay.

A related thing I was wondering about was the use of 'self' in class 
methods as the first parameter. I understand that right now it is 
necessary, but is this something that the language itself requires, or 
just the way it is implemented now? It seems like a waste of typing to 
always have to put self as the first parameter in every class method. Is 
there no way for it to be implied?