Why is self only a convention and not a real Python keyword?

Question

As far as I know, self is just a very powerful convention and it\'s not really a reserved keyword in Python. Java and C# have this as a keyword. I really f

Answer 1

Because a method is just a function who's first parameter is used to pass the object. You can write a method like this:

class Foo(object):
    pass

def setx(self, x):
    self.x = x

Foo.setx = setx

foo = Foo()
foo.setx(42)
print foo.x    # Prints 42.

Whatever the merit or otherwise of this philosophy, it does result in a more unified notion of functions and methods.