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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Mon Jul 15 21:56:45 CEST 2013

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 15:51:31 -0400 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Jul 14, 2013, at 06:11 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>Private interfaces PEP 8 does say: singleleadingunderscore: weak "internal use" indicator. E.g. from M import * does not import objects whose name starts with an underscore. I'm in favor of making this a stronger recommendation, but I have a small semantic quibble. Instead of "private interface" it should be "non-public interface". The two aren't quite the same thing; for example, often single-leading underscores are used for methods that subclasses are supposed to override, e.g. akin to "protected" in C++.

C++ doesn't have a monopoly over the definition of "private".

Besides, Python doesn't really have any strong notion of privateness, so saying "non-public" means "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".

If it doesn't have any notion of privateness, then it can't have a notion of "publicness" either. If you really want another word (I am personally fine with "private"), "internal" it should be.

Regards

Antoine.

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