Sarir said: > Here are my questions: > > 1) What are the benefits of using a member variable without the 'self' > qualifier? (I think this is because you can use _x without an > instance of A().)
No such thing as a benefit here. self.a inside a method is the same as a outside (see code below for what I mean). > 2) Is there a preferred coding style (_x vs self.x)? This is essentially a non sequitur. > 3) Should private data be written as self._x instead of self.x? This is a long standing debate. The usual answer is "we are all grownups here", meaning that self.x is preferred. However, I personally like self._x to let potential users of my code know that I intended it to be private. The code I was talking about: >>> class bob: ... a = 2 ... def get_a(self): ... return self.a ... def set_a(self,an_a): ... self.a = an_a ... >>> abob = bob() >>> abob.get_a() 2 >>> abob.a 2 >>> abob.set_a(14) >>> abob.a 14 >>> abob.get_a() 14 >>> class carol: ... self.a = 22 ... Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? File "<stdin>", line 2, in carol NameError: name 'self' is not defined James -- James Stroud, Ph.D. UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics Box 951570 Los Angeles, CA 90095 http://www.jamesstroud.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
