Local binding of "self" to another variable in instance methods acceptable?

Question

Is it acceptable according to the standards of best practice to locally bind self in a instance method to another variable? It comes in handy, especially when testing the method. I would also like to like know whether this approach is more efficient if instance attributes are retrieve within loops. Here is an example

class C:

    def __init__(self):

        self.a = "some attribute"



    def some_function(self):

        c = self

        for _ in range(10):

            print(c.a)

Answer 1

This generally offers no benefits. The only up-side of doing this (a bit differently) is if you want to eliminate the attribute look-up:

def some_function(self):
    c = self.a   # note, we assign 'a'
    for _ in range(10):
        print(c)

which will reduce execution speed on a minuscule degree. Other than that you really get no benefit of renaming self like that.

Local binding of "self" to another variable in instance methods acceptable?

Sign up