[swift-evolution] Proposal: Re-instate mandatory self for accessing instance properties and functions

[James Campbell]

I think this should be extended to functions as well. How would you know
the difference between a global function and a class function ?

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 10:28 PM, Slava Pestov via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I don't see anyone lay out how this proposal can interact with nested
> types and such. There's a fair amount of complexity in Swift with what you
> can do by nesting things inside of each other, so the simple conceptual
> model of "locals are unqualified, instance variables have a self. prefix"
> doesn't seem to generalize.
>
> Will I need to qualify associated types with the protocol or type name to
> refer to them? What about generic type parameters, they're sort of like
> "instance variables" too.
>
> What about class methods that want to call each other? Do they need the
> explicit 'self', or an explicit class name prefix? The latter changes
> semantics if the class method is overridden in a subclass.
>
> If we ever add the ability for an inner type to capture stored properties
> from the outer type, how do you reference properties of the outer type? I
> guess the problem has to be solved anyway to refer to an outer "self"
> explicitly, but qualifying everything with OuterType.self.foo kind of
> defeats the purpose of inner types altogether.
>
> I'm not sure I buy the readability arguments in favor of this approach. It
> seems the languages where explicit 'self' was adopted did it mostly by
> accident, or because of implementation concerns. In Python for instance,
> there's no way for assignment to modify a binding in an outer scope, so
> 'foo = bar' always sets a local named 'foo', IIRC. So explicit self is
> needed there. Greg Parker explains earlier in this thread by explicit self
> was chosen for Objective-C, and it wasn't readability.
>
> Slava
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>



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