From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-09-05T03:16:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "William Djaja Tjokroaminata" <billtj@z.glue.umd.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 1:04 PM
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics


> I completely agree with you.  Probably it is the standard way of
> transforming a non-OO language into a OO language (just like OTcl from
> Tcl).  In language like C++, which is closely related to C which is very
> low level, the language designer has bothered to hide the "this" pointer
> so that we don't have to explicitly write it unless necessary.
> 
> Therefore, when in Python, which claims to be an OO language, we have to
> write object method as
> 
>     def f1 (self, arg1, arg2, ...)
>         self.data1 = ...
> 
> , I think it is very crude; it smells like a standard procedural language
> which was tweaked later to provide OO functionality (just like Perl, with
> its ugly module construction to support class 
> functionality).  Furthermore, in Python an object is pretty much a hash,
> where we can access and add additional data members anywhere,
> anytime, which is totally opposite to the "information hiding" concept in
> OOP.  This is one of most important reasons, if not *the* main reason I
> switched from Python ro Ruby.

I have heard of the "passing self" feature 
of Python, and I have not really understood it.

I did a similar trick years ago when I had
to use pure C but wanted to do a little OO.
That was a simple ugly hack in order to gain
a little flexibility.

But Python people seem to think this is a 
feature, not a shortcoming. I saw it explained
once (on this list), and I thought I grasped
what he was saying, but I still was not
convinced.

A search for "Python" and "self" might find
that post.

Hal