The whitespaceless frontend

[Edward Elliott]

Sion Arrowsmith wrote:
> Absolutely. I've written quite a lot of code (which I wasn't expecting
> anyone else to maintain) using 'I' for the same reasons. Plus, it's
> even shorter in terms of characters (if not keystrokes), stands out
> reasonably well, and for how I read it makes for better English
> grammar (eg I.send_response(...) -- I guess it depends on whether 
> you're doing the mental transformation of method call to message
> passing).

I didn't like 'I' because:
1. i don't like caps except for constants (which it sorta is, i guess)
2. it's too close to 'i' which is standard for temporary loop variables
3. the bad grammar (for message passing) is all the fun!

> I stopped doing this when I started (a) maintaining other people's
> Python code, and having them maintain mine and (b) using editors
> whose Python syntax highlighting coloured "self" as special.
> "Readability counts" wins over a couple of extra characters.

Sadly, tis true.  Which makes me wish they'd just hard-coded 'self' for the
damn thing in the first place.  Nothing worse than knowing what you're
missing.