In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Kurda Yon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
