mystilleef wrote: > I decided to change the name of an attribute. Problem is I've used the > attribute in several places spanning thousands of lines of code. If I > had encapsulated the attribute via an accessor, I wouldn't need to do > an unreliable and tedious search and replace accross several source > code files to achieve my goal. I could simply change the name of the > attribute and move on.
You could, but then you'd be left with crap names for your accessors! In your equivalent Java code, you'd typically have used the accessors in several places throughout the code (or else why bother using them?), so you wouldn't be any better off! The main benefit for having accessors in Java is not that you can change the *name* of an attribute, but that you can change the implementation of the attribute - i.e. change the what actually happens to when the accessor is called. Which you can do in Python with properties. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
