I'm reading van Rossum's tutorial. Mostly it is well written and examples are given. However sometimes I get lost in a text, when it doesn't give any examples and no clues. There are several examples of this in chapter 9 about classes. Here's one from 9.6 (Private Variables). I quote
"There is limited support for class-private identifiers. Any identifier of the form __spam (at least two leading underscores, at most one trailing underscore) is textually replaced with _classname__spam, where classname is the current class name with leading underscore(s) stripped. This mangling is done without regard to the syntactic position of the identifier, so it can be used to define class-private instance and class variables, methods, variables stored in globals, and even variables stored in instances. private to this class on instances of other classes. ... Outside classes, or when the class name consists of only underscores, no mangling occurs. Name mangling is intended to give classes an easy way to define "private" instance variables and methods, without having to worry about instance variables defined by derived classes, or mucking with instance variables by code outside the class. Note that the mangling rules are designed mostly to avoid accidents;" Could someone provide an example of the above or direct me to a page where it is used. Bob -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
