[Python-Dev] Breaking undocumented API (original) (raw)

Hrvoje Niksic hrvoje.niksic at avl.com
Fri Nov 12 10:49:48 CET 2010

On 11/11/2010 11:24 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:

Nick Coghlan wrote:

My personal opinion is that we should be trying to get the standard library to the point where all definitions are unnecessary - if a name isn't in all, it should start with an underscore (and if that is true, then the all definition becomes effectively redundant). What about names imported from other modules that are used by the module, but not intended for re-export? How would you prevent them from turning up in help() etc. without using all?

import foo as _foo

I believe I am not the only one who finds that practice ugly, but I find it just as ugly to underscore-ize every non-public helper function. all is there for a reason, let's use it. Maybe help() could automatically ignore stuff not in all, or display it but warn the user of non-public identifiers?

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