Hi all, I've been studying Object Oriented Theory using Java. Theoretically, all attributes should be private, meaning no one except the methods itself can access the attribute;
public class Foo { private int bar; ... Normally in Java, we would write getters and setters to set/get the attribute bar. However, in Python, we normally create a class like so; class Foo(object): bar = 0 ... And we usually don't write any getters/setters (though they exist in Python, I have not seen much projects making use of it). We can easily encapsulate (data hiding) Foo's class using the '_' (underscore) when creating a new attribute, however, this would require all attributes to have a underscore. According to this answer [1], it's acceptable to to expose your attribute directly (Foo.bar = 0), so I wonder where the encapsulation happens in Python? If I can access the attribute whenever I want (with the except of using a underscore), what's the best way to encapsulate a class in Python? Why aren't most of the projects not using getters/setters and instead they access the variable directly? Regards, Ben Mezger [1] - http://stackoverflow.com/q/4555932
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
-- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list