From: Paul Prescod <paul@...>
Date: 2003-03-21T14:59:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Strong advantages over Python

I'm not going to go back and forth on preferences, but just talk about 
technical details.

Lennon Day-Reynolds wrote:
> ...
> Python class definitions always seemed much more to be a sort of 
> template for object creation, esp. with the required 'self' parameter 
> and lack of runtime association b/t method definitions and object method 
> bindings.

I'm not sure what you mean by this latter bit. The self paramater is 
purely a syntactic issue. And object method bindings do have a "runtime 
association" with method definitions. That's how the interpreter finds 
which methods go with which object.

> ... (And yes, 
> before anyone mentions it, I've seen the recently-added functionality in 
> Python 2.2 to create that kind of protected attribute. IIRC, however, it 
> requires defining a new class that "impersonates" a simple scalar, and 
> it will be quite a while before the existing body of Python libraries 
> and applications are updated to use it.)

There is no need to impersonate a scalar.

http://www.python.org/doc/2.2.1/whatsnew/sect-rellinks.html#SECTION000340000000000000000

  Paul Prescod