Guido van Rossum wrote: > On 12/12/05, Jim Fulton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>In practice, I don't agree that it works fine. Inevitably, someone >>finds a need to access a "private" variable in a subclass. Or >>even in the original class, you find some need to use something like >>__getattr__ where the implicit name mangling doesn't come into play >>and you have to emulate the name mangling. Or perhaps someone wants >>to examine the value of one of these variables in the debugger. >>In my experience, almost every time someone uses the __private >>trick, they or someone else comes to regret it. >> >>OTOH, explicit name mangling provides the benefits of implicit >>name mangling without it's drawbacks. > > > I half agree. I've seen many classes overuse __private.
As I point out above, it's not just a matter of overuse. It is only recognized by the compiler, so it doesn't work with getattr. And of couuse, there's the debugger issue. I've often found cases where, even when I was using it correctly, I had to do manual name mangling myself. Anytime one has to perform weird tricks in Python to work around magic should be a warning sign. > But that's a > separate issue from not having the feature at all; you might as well > argue against private in Java or C++. I'm not arguing against the feature but against it's implementation. My intuition is that the explicit name magling approach is more in keeping with Python's way of doing things. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org _______________________________________________ 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
