Please preserve attribution lines on the quoted material, so we can see who wrote what at each level.
benhoyt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Then again, what's stopping us just using a single leading > > > underscore? Nobody calls their own private methods _init or _add > > > > You must be looking at different code from the rest of us. A > > single leading underscore on the name *is* the convention for > > "this attribute is not part of the external interface", which is > > about as "private" as Python normally gets. > > Yeah, I understand that. I meant -- and I could be wrong -- that I > haven't seen people creating a method called "init" with a single > leading underscore. It's too similar to "__init__", so they would > use some other name. > > In other words, defining _init to mean what __init__ now means > probably wouldn't cause name conflicts. But it would conflict with the existing conventions. '_init' as a name indicates that it's *not* treated specially, because it's not named with double-underscores. Since it *is* treated specially by Python, it would be confusing not to follow the convention for naming such attributes. -- \ "I know you believe you understood what you think I said, but I | `\ am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I | _o__) meant." -- Robert J. McCloskey | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list