Guido's new method definition idea

Kay Schluehr kay.schluehr at gmx.net
Sat Dec 6 01:55:38 EST 2008


On 6 Dez., 03:21, "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. 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.

So both forms are dual to each other ( "backwards compatibility" ) and
can be used both?

I'm -0 on this although I think the proposition fits better with the
method call syntax.



More information about the Python-list mailing list