On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 12:17:13 -0600, Philippe C. Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I use "__"for private variables because I must have read on net it was > the way to do so - yet this seems to have changed - thanks: > > http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/pytut/tut_77.html
Nope, that's still the right way to make a member 'really' private. Stephen was pointing out a very common Python idiom - "private by convention", and suggesting that using it would be more appropriate. A member with a single preceding underscore is private by convention. That is to say, there is no mechanism in place to prevent clients of the class accessing these members, but they should consider themselves to have been warned that they do so at their own risk. If you take the back off the radio, the warranty is void. ;-) I (and by inference Stephen) feel that this is a more "Pythonic" approach. Give the programmer the information that they need, but don't try to stop them from doing what they need to do. -- Cheers, Simon B, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
