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Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> James Y Knight <foom <at> fuhm.net> writes:
>> It seems that a separate method "\_internal\_close" should've been
>> defined to do the actual closing of the file, and the close() method
>> should've been defined on the base class as "self.flush();
>> self.\_internal\_close()" and never overridden.
>
> I'm completely open to changes as long as there is a reasonable consensus around
> them. Your proposal looks sane, although the fact that a semi-private method
> (starting with an underscore) is designed to be overriden in some classes is a
> bit annoying.

Note that we already do that in a couple of places where it makes sense
\- in those cases the underscore is there to tell \*clients\* of the class
"don't call this directly", but it is still explicitly documented as
part of the subclassing API.

(the only example I can find at the moment is in asynchat, but I thought
there were a couple of more common ones than that - hopefully I'll think
of them later)