CoffeeScript has a nice syntactic sugar for setting properties by prefixing the argument name with "@": class Foo constructor: (@x, @y) -> @z = @x + @y setFoo: (@foo) -> Which compiles to: http://coffeescript.org/#try:class%20Foo%0A%20%20constructor...
Interesting you mentioned CoffeeScript and syntactic sugar, because adding an equivalent "self." in python inits' parameter names doesn't work the same way in CoffeeScript. def __init__(self, self.x, self.y): # fail pass Did you mention this because there is an existing PEP that proposes this functionality?
[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-July/05456...
[2] http://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/101594-__autoinit__-pr...