[Please don't top-post]
Steven Bethard wrote:
> Panos Laganakos wrote:
>> we usually define private properties and provide public functions
>> to access them, in the form of:
>> get { ... } set { ... }
>>
>> Should we do the same in Python:
>>
>> self.__privateAttr = 'some val'
>>
>> def getPrivateAttr(self):
>> return self.__privateAttr
>>
>> Or there's no point in doing so?
>
> There is no point in doing so. You should use plain attributes
> whenever possible (that is, whenever you're really just doing a get or
> a set, with no computation). The only reason to use getters and
> setters is so that you can change the implementation later if you need
> to. But python allows you to do this with properties:
[snip]
> Which should not be interpreted as saying you should start writing a
> bunch of properties now. ;) Instead, only introduce a property when
> you find that something must remain an attribute (presumably for
> backwards compatibility reasons) but for whatever reason it now needs
> some additional computation.
Philippe Martin top-posted:
> Why is that ? to me it makes sense when I see self.__m_var that I'm dealing
> with a member variable taht derived classes will not see/access.
If the OP uses a private attribute in combination with a getter and a
setter, he's basically still exposing the attribute as public, but
making it harder to get and set. There's no reason to do that. If
you're going to expose a public API to part of the class that just
assigns and returns a value (with no computation), you might as well
make that API an attribute instead of a pair of methods.
STeVe
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