Self function

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Tue, 05 May 2009 22:35:08 -0300, Rhodri James  
<rhodri at wildebst.demon.co.uk> escribió:
> On Tue, 05 May 2009 21:43:16 +0100, <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote:
>> wolfram.hinde...:

>>> It is easy to change all references of the function name, except for
>>> those in the function body itself? That needs some explantation.
>>
>> I can answer this. If I have a recursive function, I may want to
>> create a similar function, so I copy and paste it, to later modify the
>> copied version. Then to change its name I usually don't use a search &
>> rename of its name into its block of code because it's usually
>> useless. In non-recursive functions the name of the function is stated
>> only once, at the top.
>
> I'm sorry, but while I'm mildly positive towards the proposal (and more
> so towards Aaron's decorator), I don't buy this argument at all.  What
> is broken about your editor's global search-and-replace function that
> makes it "usually useless" for making these name changes?

It happened to me sometimes. If a module defines some functions, and it  
doesn't *use* them, why should I use a global search-and-replace to rename  
something? Modifying the "def" line should be enough - unless the function  
happens to be recursive.

It's the DRY principle in action, the same argument as when decorators  
where introduced: there should be no need to repeat the function name  
again and again.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina