On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:47:34 -0800, Chris Rebert wrote: > On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Peng Yu <pengyu...@gmail.com> wrote: >> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ >> >> The above webpage states the following naming convention. Such a >> variable can be an internal variable in a class. I'm wondering what is >> the naming convention for the method that access such variable. >> >> - _single_leading_underscore: weak "internal use" indicator. E.g. >> "from M >> import *" does not import objects whose name starts with an >> underscore. > > If there's a method to access the variable, then it's not all that > private, is it?
True, but it might be read-only, or the accessor might do validation to ensure that the caller doesn't stuff a string in something expected to be a float, or some sort of computed attribute. That's why we have properties. > Accessor methods are not Pythonic. Accessor methods are *usually* not Pythonic, at least not the way they are commonly used in Java. In fact, Python has at least two built-in accessor functions: globals() locals() There may be others. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list