On Jan 20, 12:04 pm, "Russ P." <russ.paie...@gmail.com> wrote: Hey, if pylint can reliably detect private data access violations, > that's good news to me. I haven't used it, so I don't know. (I used > pychecker a while back, but I haven't used that for a while either.) > > If pylint can check access violations, then it seems to me that > someone (who is familiar with the internals of the Python interpreter) > should be able to integrate that feature into Python itself relatively > easily. > > Actually, in addition to the enforcement of "private," you also need > the enforcement of "protected." If you only enforce "private," derived > classes will not have access to data they need. And if you don't > enforce "protected," then anyone can trivially gain access to private > data by simply deriving a new class. It would be like having a lock on > the door with the key hanging right there on a string. > > I realize that this complicates matters. As I said before, I am not > claiming that Python should necessarily get enforced data hiding. All > I am saying is that, if it doesn't get it, it will never be > appropriate for certain domains. But maybe nobody cares about that > except me.
If pylint had "private" it should behave like "protected". Basic encapsulation is about good style (separation of concerns), not security, and subclassing is a clear statement that this concern is closely related. Of course if you accept that the extremism of security is a separate issue then you have the question of how much is necessary to encourage separation of concerns, and and what should be available to work around it... > The other problem with the pylint approach is aesthetic: the > requirement for a leading underscore to indicate private data. I > realize that some actually like that convention, but I don't. I spend > most of my development time working with "private" data, and why > should I have to look at that litter everywhere? I use Python in part > because I want clean looking code, and leading underscores bother me > -- just as the leading dollar signs in Perl bother many Python > programmers. There needs to be *some* indicator that separates a public property from a private one. What would you suggest? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
