[Python-Dev] Tweaking PEP 8 guidelines for use of leading underscores (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Mon Jul 15 07:16:37 CEST 2013

Nick Coghlan writes:

Of course private modules are sane. I never suggested "no new private modules at all". But putting them in the same namespace as public modules is not, just to save a leading underscore in the file name.

It's not to save a leading underscore - it's to avoid renaming existing packages like pip and idlelib.

"existing" is not a subset of "new." Am I missing something?

What Steven is suggesting is that there are two kinds of private package in the stdlib: those that can conveniently be given names that indicate that they are private (generally, "new" packages), and those that can't ("existing" packages).

For the latter IIRC he suggested adding a line at the top of the module documentation "This module is private, and you cannot depend on API compatibility with future or past releases of this module. The public API is in ... [alternatively, There is no public API]."

I really don't see how one can object to this suggestion, given an appropriate definition of "convenient enough to get a _name".

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