Python is chock-full of identifiers beginning and ending with double underscores, such as __builtin__, __contains__, and __coerce__.
Using underscores to signal that an identifier is somehow "private" to an implementation is pretty common in languages other than Python. But in these cases the understanding is that the use of these variables in external code amounts to "going behind the API", and is therefore unwise. But as far as I can tell, Python's double-underscore variables are very much part of Python's API. E.g., programmers are specifically instructed to override "double-underscore methods" to achieve certain functionalities. In this case, I wonder: what justifiies the double-underscore convention? For example, what would be the problem with changing the name of the complex.__gt__ method to complex.gt? TIA! kynn -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
