July 15, 2013
7:51 p.m.
On Jul 14, 2013, at 06:11 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
Private interfaces
PEP 8 does say: _single_leading_underscore: 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++. 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". -Barry