On 16 November 2016 at 08:51, Mikhail V <mikhail...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What semantics it will fundamentally break or so hard to implement?
I'm afraid I don't have time at the moment to fully review your email,
but my first impression is that you are proposing that the name "self"
be treated specially. It's going to be very difficult to convince
people that this is a good idea.
In the first instance, if you're talking about "self" being a keyword,
that would break the current usage of "self" as a normal variable
name, which is used by convention in all class methods to represent
the current object. If you're not aware, in
class A:
def method(self):
...
the use of self as the variable name is *convention*. You could use
any other name just as well. If self were a keyword, it couldn't be
used here.
So making "self" a keyword would be a major change.
In addition, consider code like this:
class A(int):
def method(self):
myvar = 1
myvar = self + 1
return myvar
foo = A(5)
foo.method()
This is legitimate code at the moment. It sets "myvar" to 6 (self is
an integer subclass with value 5, which the code adds 1 to) and
returns that. Your proposal would change that to return 2.
The problem here is that when considering language changes, you can't
just consider code that you consider "correct". You have to take
account of the fact that other people may be writing code that is to
your eyes bizarre and unmaintainable - but if it does what they want
it to, and it works according to the language specification, they have
a right to expect that the behaviour won't get changed (at least not
without due consideration of the backward compatibility process). So
proposals that change the behaviour of currently working code have to
be *very* careful to consider all edge cases.
This is probably the biggest hurdle for people proposing changes to
Python to get over. Backward compatibility isn't pleasant to deal with
- it's frustrating and demotivating to have a good idea blocked
because code that seems senseless "might break". But that's part of
the price we have to pay for Python being a hugely popular language.
Hope this is useful.
Paul
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