So I'll throw out an idea of my own for discussion. This is NOT a PEP...
and therefore NOT a serious proposal for a change in Python. I just want
to hear what other people think about it and compare your sense of
language design with my own.

One of the things that still throws me in Python is writing things like
this:

class MyClass(OtherClass):
    def addItems( newItems ):
       self.items += newItems

Of course what I've forgotten to do here is to declare 'self' as the
first parameter to addItems(). The reason I forgot is that when I CALL
the method it looks like this:
      myObj.addItems( userItems )
so when I'm writing it I'm thinking of it as a function of one parameter.

Proposals for leaving off 'self' have been made many times, but that's a
bad idea... the fact that every variable reference is (1) local, (2)
nested scoped, or (3) global and can be found by a simple textual search
through the source code is a VERY ELEGANT thing about Python. But
writing the method one place with 2 arguments and another place with
just 1 is not elegant.

So here's my idea. Allow the following syntax:

class MyClass(OtherClass):
    def self.addItems( newItems ):
       self.items += newItems

So in method declarations where we normally permit only an identifier
for the method-name, we now allow also identifier '.' identifier. The
identifier before the dot simply becomes the first parameter of the
method. I don't think it would be good style to use this for non-methods
(ie, normal functions not belonging to a class), but I suppose there's
no reason to prohibit the syntax. There's no way to set default values
for this parameter, but you don't do that with 'self' anyhow, right?

As far as I can tell, there'd be no syntactic ambiguity (please correct
me if I've missed something). And it would make the DECLARATION of a
method look a whole lot more like the USE of the method, without
removing the elegance of declaring 'self' like any other variable.

So... what do you folks think?