On Feb 2, 4:35 pm, "Rhodri James" <rho...@wildebst.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> This really, really, *really* isn't a tangent. It's the heart of > the matter. You are advocating a change that doesn't fit with > Python's "consenting adults" approach to programming. It's trivial > to enforce hiding using static checking tools if you really feel the > need to not trust yourself; it's much harder (though by no means > impossible) to break language-enforced hiding when (not if) an > interface turns out to be inadequate. Here we go again. If you have access to the source code (as you nearly always do with Python code), then "breaking the language-enforced data hiding" is a trivial matter of deleting the word "private" (or equivalent). I know ... changing one word constitutes a "fork." Yeah, right. You can't be bothered to change one word, but the library developer should be required to litter his code with leading underscores everywhere, and large development teams should depend on labor intensive code reviews for checks that could be automated by the language. (And, please ... I am not suggesting that enforced access restrictions would render code reviews unnecessary, but it could certainly simplify them.) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list