Start the attribute name with "_" and don't document it. If clients mess with it, they're to blame.
The problem is that client code must *define* this attribute when subclassing BaseClass - and that's (well, in most case that should be) the only place where they have to deal with it (unless they want to do mumbo-jumbo thangs, in which case that's not my problem anymore !-).
What I want is to prevent client code to accidentally mess with it, and have strange bugs that they may have hard time to fix. At the same time, I want to have the cleanest syntax for the subclass declaration. In fact, in most cases, the client code should not have much more to do than defining a handfull of class attributes to end up with a taylor-made fully functional subclass.
Bruno -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
