Guido's new method definition idea

[MRAB]

Neal Becker wrote:
> Daniel Fetchinson wrote:
> 
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> The story of the explicit self in method definitions has been
>> discussed to death and we all know it will stay. However, Guido
>> himself acknowledged that an alternative syntax makes perfect sense
>> and having both (old and new) in a future version of python is a
>> possibility since it maintains backward compatibility. The alternative
>> syntax will be syntactic sugar for the old one. This blog post of his
>> is what I'm talking about:
>>
>> http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/10/why-explicit-self-has-to-stay.html
>>
>> The proposal is to allow this:
>>
>> class C:
>>     def self.method( arg ):
>>         self.value = arg
>>         return self.value
>>
>> instead of this:
>>
>> class C:
>>     def method( self, arg ):
>>         self.value = arg
>>         return self.value
>>
>> I.e. explicit self stays only the syntax is slightly different and may
>> seem attractive to some. As pointed out by Guido classmethods would
>> work similarly:
>>
>> class C:
>>     @classmethod
>>     def cls.method( arg ):
>>         cls.val = arg
>>         return cls.val
>>
>> The fact that Guido says,
>>
>> "Now, I'm not saying that I like this better than the status quo. But
>> I like it a lot better than [...] but it has the great advantage that
>> it is backward compatible, and can be evolved into a PEP with a
>> reference implementation without too much effort."
>>
>> shows that the proposal is viable.
>>
>> I'd like this new way of defining methods, what do you guys think?
>> Anyone ready for writing a PEP?
>>
> What's the advantage?  If there is not a good reason, I would strongly opposed polluting the language.
> 
I wouldn't want to see $ for "self." and ¢ (cent) for "cls." either...