> Has anyone thought about alternatives? Is there a previous discussion > on this I can look up?
Okay, I just emailed the BDFL and asked if he could tell me the origin of the double underscore syntax for __special__ methods, and what he said I'm pretty sure he won't mind me posting here: > [Guido van Rossum said:] > The specific naming convention was borrowed from the C standard, which > reserves names like __FILE__ and __LINE__. The reason for needing a > convention for "system-assigned" names was that I didn't want users to > be surprised by the system giving a special meaning to methods or > variables they had defined without intending that special meaning, > while at the same time not wanting to introduce a physically separate > namespace (e.g. a separate dict) for system names. I have no regrets. After that and this thread, I'm pretty good with it, I guess. :-) Cheers, Ben. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
