Do I need "self" and "other"?

[David C. Ullrich]

In article 
<68566b52-100d-40ee-a0c6-bde20df9ecd4 at a70g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>,
 Kurda Yon <kurdayon at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I found one example which defines the addition of two vectors as a
> method of a class. It looks like that:
> 
> class Vector:
>   def __add__(self, other):
>     data = []
>     for j in range(len(self.data)):
>       data.append(self.data[j] + other.data[j])
>     return Vector(data)
> 
> In this example one uses "self" and "other". Does one really need to
> use this words? And, if yes, why? I have replaced "self" by "x" and
> "other" by "y" and everything looks OK. Is it really OK or I can have
> some problem in some cases?

What everyone else has said: yes and no.

Having said that, it seems to me like this is exactly the sort
of situation where 'x' and 'y' make a lot of sense - self means
that this is the object on which the method was invoked, and
here that seems irrelevant: If you want to calculate x + y
you use x.data and y.data...

Otoh, I once saw a library (someone's Python arbitrary-precision
reals package) where he used x and y, and sure enough I was
confused.

Otooh, I was't confused by it for long, and I quickly decided
that it actually made _that_ code look like it made more sense.

> Thank you!

-- 
David C. Ullrich