[Python-Dev] Tweaking PEP 8 guidelines for use of leading underscores

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jul 15, 2013, at 08:23 PM, Chris McDonough wrote:

>On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 18:40 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> Working from what I think is the latest version.
>> 
>> In general, i'd rather be prescriptive of future conventions than
>> descriptive of current conventions.  It's okay to exempt existing code, and
>> as a general rule we've never been fond of rewriting existing code to
>> update it to new standards or APIs.  We don't need to do so here either.
>
>FWIW, I'm very skeptical of a PEP 8 guideline that would try to
>proscribe that the "non-internal" API of a module or class would be
>defined solely by a naming convention.
>
>If what's being described here does become a rule, there is reason to
>believe that future users who treat this PEP as the word-of-god (and
>there are a *lot* of them; I hear from people literally every week who
>want to "PEP8-ify" my code in some limited-value-added way) will be
>harmed.  They'll be living in a fantasy world where every
>non-underscore-prefixed thing is now a defacto API.  But I have lived in
>a world where that has not been the case since 1998, and the chance that
>I'll go back and change all my public code to satisfy a questionable
>introspection convention is pretty slim.

I can sympathize with this.  What I tried to get at, but probably didn't
succeed, is to say "if it starts with a single underscore, treat it as
internal" but not necessarily the converse, i.o.w. if it *doesn't* start with
an underscore that does not imply that it's public.

-Barry
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