Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> added the comment: Maybe the wording should be changed, but name mangling serves a useful purpose. There are two definitions of "private" which seem to be a bit conflated in this section: * "private" as in, "this name is not part of the public API - use it at your own risk". * "private" as in, "I don't want someone to accidentally stomp on this attribute name when subclassing this class". I think it is valuable to mention both of these conventions in the tutorial for a couple reasons: * the tutorial is meant for people new to Python but with experience in other programming languages * the distinction between _a and __a is a bit subtle and not obviously similar to privacy features present in other languages. I work with a lot of C++ programmers who also write some Python (sometimes a lot of Python). It's clear at times that the distinction hasn't always sunk in. ---------- nosy: +skip.montanaro _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue8638> _______________________________________