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

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Tue Jul 16 15:39:12 CEST 2013


On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 23:19:21 +1000, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

On 16/07/13 20:28, Richard Oudkerk wrote: > On 16/07/2013 6:44am, Nick Coghlan wrote: >> Clarifying what constitutes an internal interface in a way that >> doesn't require renaming anything is a necessary prerequisite for >> bundling or bootstrapping the pip CLI in Python 3.4 (as pip exposes >> its internal implemetnation API as "import pip" rather than "import >> pip" and renaming it would lead to a lot of pointless code churn). >> Without that concern, the topic never would have come up. > > BTW, how does the use of all effect things? Somewhere I got the idea that if a module uses all then anything not listed is internal. I take it that is wrong?

That is not how I interpret all. In the absence of any explicit documentation, I interpret all as nothing more than a list of names which wildcard imports will bring in, without necessarily meaning that other names are private. For example, I might have a module explicitly designed for wildcard imports at the interactive interpreter: from module import * brings in the functions which I expect will be useful interactively, not necessarily the entire public API. For example, pkgutil includes classes with single-underscore methods, which I take as private. It also has a function simplegeneric, which is undocumented and not listed in all. In in the absence of even a comment saying "Don't use this", I take it as an oversight, not policy that simplegeneric is private.

I think you'd be wrong about that, though. simplegeneric should really be treated as private. I'm speaking here not about the general principle of the thing, but about my understanding of simplegeneric's specific history.

--David



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