> Also lots of languages have syntactic sugar around the corresponding object e.g. implicitly dereference it for attribute access and method calls
The parent comment specifically said "by utilizing the pseudo-variable 'this' (or 'self' in Smalltalk)", so I was referring to that. Yes, in languages where the receiver is implicitly added to the lexical scope chain, things get a bit more complex.
> or even give it exclusive(ish) properties like @ in Ruby (or straight up instance variable access in smalltalk). Even Python treats it specially, given a method `foo`, `obj.foo` actually returns a proxy object which partially applies `foo` to `obj`. This only works on functions defined on the class object, mere callables set on the instance don't get that treatment.
Sure, there's other features that object-oriented languages tend to hang off methods too, but my point was just that from the perspective of within a method body, the receiver's mostly just another parameter. This is made explicit in some languages:
The parent comment specifically said "by utilizing the pseudo-variable 'this' (or 'self' in Smalltalk)", so I was referring to that. Yes, in languages where the receiver is implicitly added to the lexical scope chain, things get a bit more complex.
> or even give it exclusive(ish) properties like @ in Ruby (or straight up instance variable access in smalltalk). Even Python treats it specially, given a method `foo`, `obj.foo` actually returns a proxy object which partially applies `foo` to `obj`. This only works on functions defined on the class object, mere callables set on the instance don't get that treatment.
Sure, there's other features that object-oriented languages tend to hang off methods too, but my point was just that from the perspective of within a method body, the receiver's mostly just another parameter. This is made explicit in some languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Function_Call_Syntax