"chiaro scuro" <kiaroskuro@[...].com>  wrote in message 
news:dd533d4b0602280544x5addda10xf002768a82dec83@[...]..

> However, I guess that doing allowing 'selfless' attributes would cause
> some worst inconsistency somewhere else.  i just wonder what it could
> be.

One explanation I've heard for this behavior is that if 'self' was implied 
in this case, but you actually -did- want to use a local variable with the 
same name, that some kind of prefix would be required (which would be 
weirder than the current behavior).