I decided to change the name of an attribute. Problem is I've used the attribute in several places spanning thousands of lines of code. If I had encapsulated the attribute via an accessor, I wouldn't need to do an unreliable and tedious search and replace accross several source code files to achieve my goal. I could simply change the name of the attribute and move on. Well, I'm glad python has properties. It's a feature that should be advertised more, especially for large scale python development.
Diez B. Roggisch wrote: > mystilleef wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > What is the Pythonic way of implementing getters and setters. I've > > heard > > people say the use of accessors is not Pythonic. But why? And what is > > the alternative? I refrain from using them because they smell > > "Javaish." > > But now my code base is expanding and I'm beginning to appreciate the > > wisdom behind them. I welcome example code and illustrations. > > Which wisdom do you mean? The wisdom that a language that has no property > mechanism and thus can't intercept setting and getting of instance members > needs a bulky convention called JAVA Beans, so that _all_ uses of > properties are tunneled through some code, even if only a few percent of > these actually need that? > > Or the wisdom that strangling developers by putting access modifiers with > approx. a dozen different rules in place is an annoyance to adult > developers to say the least? > > These are the reasons they are not pythonic. We can intercept property > access (see the property descriptor, http://pyref.infogami.com/property), > and we trust in developers being able to judge form themselves if messing > with internals of code is a good idea or not. > > Regards, > > Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
