Hi all :) I've really been wondering about the following lately. The question is this: if there are no (real) private or protected members in Python, how can you be sure, when inheriting from another class, that you won't wind up overriding, and possibly clobbering some important data field of the parent class, which might compromise its entire functionality?
I mean, nevermind the double underscore business, I know all about it. But, honestly, not everybody uses that, so you can't really be sure about what you're doing, right? Maybe the author forgot to warn about some special member in the docs for instance, or even worse, it's a third-party library, perhaps with no source! So how can you be sure??? The way I see it ... you can't! Am I wrong? Please give me a hand on this one :) Rock -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
