Thanks Ed - much appreciated!
Rodgy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ed Leafe" <[email protected]>
To: "Dabo Users list" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, December 21, 2008 2:23 PM
Subject: Re: [dabo-users] An oop question
> On Dec 20, 2008, at 9:56 PM, Roger Lovelock wrote:
>
>> I see a lot of underscores and double underscores used in python/dabo
>> variable names and also when looking at some menu code a
>> construction with
>> brackets an underscore and then further brackets eg
>>
>> vm.append(_("Display Methods", ... etc ))
>>
>> and, of course, __main__ etc etc
>
>
> OK, there are 3 separate things here. First let's take the leading
> double underscores.
>
> This is the only way to make something "private" in Python. I quote
> that because it isn't really private; Python internally mangles the
> name so that if you make an identically-named method/attibute in a
> subclass, it won't override the superclass version, as it will
> internally use a completely different name.
>
> There is also the double-double underscores. This is to indicate that
> this is a "magic" method or attribute in Python. What I mean by
> "magic" is that if you don't know exactly what it's doing, you
> shouldn't mess with it or risk seriously screwing things up.
>
> Next are atts/methods that are preceeded by a single underscore.
> Technically this has no effect on the code; it's just another
> character. But by convention it is used to denote an implementation
> detail of the class that is not meant to be referenced outside of the
> class. As an example, many of our controls have a _caption attribute
> to store the content of the Caption property. The reason we named it
> with a leading underscore is that as a developer, you shouldn't read
> or set that value directly. 'Caption' is the public interface, and
> that's what you should use.
>
> Finally, there is a method whose name is simply an underscore. This
> may look odd, but it is the convention in C for indicating a string
> that is localized. The _() method takes the value and replaces it with
> the version of that string for the currently-set locale, if there is a
> translation available for it. All strings that are displayed to the
> user in Dabo are localized by wrapping them with the _() method. And
> hey, if you speak a foreign language and would like to provide
> translation services, you can contribute to Dabo by going to this page:
>
> https://translations.launchpad.net/dabo/trunk/+pots/dabo
>
> We've only got a tiny bit of the framework localized, with the
> biggest chunk done so far in German.
>
>
> -- Ed Leafe
>
>
>
>
>
[excessive quoting removed by server]
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