On 11/03/2010 01:47 AM, Ben Finney wrote:
If someone wants to depend on some undocumented detail of the
directory layout it's their problem (like people depending on bytecode
and other stuff).
I would say that names without a single leading underscore are part of
the public API, whether documented or not.
I understand this reasoning, but I'd like to offer counter-examples.
For instance, would you say that glob.glob0 and glob.glob1 are public
API? They're undocumented, they're not in __all__, but they don't have
a leading underscore either, and source comments call them "helper
functions." I'm sure there is a lot of other examples like that, both
in the standard library and in python packages out there.
Other than the existing practice, there is the matter of esthetics.
Accepting underscore-less identifiers as automatically public leads to a
proliferation of identifiers with leading underscores, which many people
(myself included) plainly don't like.
_______________________________________________
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
