>Please explain to us then how exactly you would infer a variable with an arbitrary name is actually a reference to the class instance in an interpreted language.

Did I stutter when I wrote about "an unfortunate early decision"? Who said it has to be "an arbitrary name"?

Even so, you could add a bloody marker announcing an arbitrary name (which 99% would be self anyway) as so, as an instruction to the interpreter. If it fails, it fails, like countless other things that can fail during runtime in Python today.