On 3/1/06, Nicolas Fleury <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Guido van Rossum wrote: > > In which context did you find a need for defining a static method and > > calling it inside the class definition? I'm guessing that what you're > > playing dubious scoping games. > > I'm not. I almost never use staticmethod actually. I find them not > very pythonic, in my humble own definition of pythonic. > > But since staticmethod is a standard built-in, I considered valid the > question of a programmer relatively new to Python (but obviously > appreciating its dynamic nature) wondering why calling a static method > inside a class definition doesn't work. A use case is not hard to > imagine, especially a private static method called only to build a class > attribute.
Imagined use cases aren't particularly interesting. As to the "why" question, the answer is simply that it wasn't considered an important use case since nobody could come up with a reason why you'd want to do that apart from exploring the language. > I don't know the philosophy behind making staticmethod a built-in > (instead of a function in a module only used in specific occasions), but > my guess was that what is normal scoping/regrouping in Java/C++/C# was > worth common use support in Python. But your comment about "dubious > scoping games" makes me think I, again, didn't guess right;) At the time there wasn't much thought about it -- it just seemed reasonable to support something that was supported by syntax in other languages with at least a built-in decorator in Python. > So yes, I'm proposing something I'll probably never use, but I think > would make Python more "welcoming". I don't see how adding featuers that nobody uses helps. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
