Question

Every single example I have seen of a method in a class in Python, has self as the first argument. Is this true of all methods? If so, couldn’t python have been written so that this argument was just understood and therefore not needed?

Answer 1

If you want a method that doesn’t need to access self, use staticmethod:

class C(object):
    def my_regular_method(self, foo, bar):
        pass
    @staticmethod
    def my_static_method(foo, bar):
        pass

c = C()
c.my_regular_method(1, 2)
c.my_static_method(1, 2)

If you want access to the class, but not to the instance, use classmethod:

class C(object):
    @classmethod
    def my_class_method(cls, foo, bar):
        pass

c.my_class_method(1, 2)