Guido's new method definition idea

[Antoine De Groote]

Aaron Brady wrote:
> On Dec 5, 8:21 pm, "Daniel Fetchinson" <fetchin... at googlemail.com>
> 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...
>>
>> 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.
> ...
> 
> Would it be valid outside class definitions too?  (As follows...)
> 
> def sequence.shuffle( ):
>   x= sequence[ 0 ]
>   sequence[ 0 ]= sequence[ -1 ]
>   ...etc.
> 
> shuffle( listA )

This is not what was intended. The discussion was explicitly only about
class methods.
What you are describing is weird and not generalizable. What if your
method takes more than one parameter? You might argue that "sequence"
would be the first argument in the list, like

def sequence.shuffle(a, b):
  """
  a, b: dummy arguments, just for the sake of the example
  """
  x = sequence[0]
  sequence[0] = sequence[-1
  ...etc.

shuffle(listA, 1, 1)

I can't think of any good reason to do this. What's more, the whole
discussion was partly due to error messages like

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "classes.py", line 9, in
   obj.m2(1)
TypeError: m2() takes exactly 3 arguments (2 given)

Your proposition (well actually it is only a question) would result in
error messages exactly like this one when one would not carefully read
the method signature for example.

> 
> Can you still call it by class membership?  (As follows...)
> 
> C.method( inst, arg )

That should not change at all, as the alternative syntax would actually
be only syntactic sugar.