Tim Peters wrote: > [Neal Norwitz] > >>I recently asked Guido about name mangling wrt Py3k. He definitely >>wanted to keep it in. Unless he changed his mind, I doubt he would >>deprecate it. His rationale was that there needs to be a way to >>handle name collision with multiple inheritance. > > > That wasn't quite it. The original motivation was to help avoid name > collisions under inheritance period, and especially when writing a > base class intended for subclassing by other parties, such as most > mix-in classes. For example, if your utility or mixin base class `A` > has a data member named `n`, nobody deriving from `A` dare name one of > their data members `n` too, and it's unreasonable to expect everyone > deriving from `A` to learn and avoid all the names `A` uses > internally. It's even more unreasonable for A's author to have to > promise, after A's first release, never to change the name of, or > introduce any new, attribute (A's author dare not, lest the new name > conflict with a name someone else's subclass used). > > If A's author names the attribute `__n` instead, all those problems go > away, provided only that some subclass doesn't also name itself `A`. > > That was the only point to `__` name-mangling. People who think it's > trying to, e.g., emulate C++'s `private` gimmick are enjoying a > semi-private fantasy ;-) It works fine for its intended use.
In that case it would seem to make even *more* sense, theoretically, to replace the class name in mangled names with a GUID, hence avoiding collisions in similarly-named subclasses. Then it would work even finer (though the mangled names would be longer, and less meaningful in debugging). mangling-things-by-typing-them-since-1967-ly y'rs - steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/ _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
