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What are emphatically not pretty or useful are Python’s leading underscores to loosely enforce encapsulation.IMO Go's use of upper/lower case is even worse than Python's use of underscores. What would be better? Explicitly labeling everything as `public` or `private`, C++/Java style?
> Does Python force you to pass [self] as an argument to make some kind of clever point?
I think the idea is that `a.foo(b)` should act similarly to `type(a).foo(a, b)`.
However, what happens when you define a method and miss off the `self` parameter is crazy. Inside a class, surely `def f(a, b): print(a, b)` should be a method that can be called with two arguments.
> And why are some classes (int, str, float) allowed to be lower case
Historical reasons. AFAIK in early versions of Python these weren't classes at all - the built-in types were completely separate.
IMO Go's use of upper/lower case is even worse than Python's use of underscores. What would be better? Explicitly labeling everything as `public` or `private`, C++/Java style?
> Does Python force you to pass [self] as an argument to make some kind of clever point?
I think the idea is that `a.foo(b)` should act similarly to `type(a).foo(a, b)`.
However, what happens when you define a method and miss off the `self` parameter is crazy. Inside a class, surely `def f(a, b): print(a, b)` should be a method that can be called with two arguments.
> And why are some classes (int, str, float) allowed to be lower case
Historical reasons. AFAIK in early versions of Python these weren't classes at all - the built-in types were completely separate.