Origin of double underscore convention?

[Grant Edwards]

In article <Y96d4.1764$oF2.5206 at ozemail.com.au>, Jason Stokes wrote:

>I'm relatively new to Python.  This is possibly a dumb question, but
>I'm wondering about the double underscore convention to mark an inbuilt
>or internal method.  I find it pretty ugly and I'm wondering if it was
>chosen for any historical reason, eg analogy to another language.  

Some C compilers used to prefix all user-declared variables
with "_".  That way they would never collide with assembly
language variables as long as the assy lang didn't use variables
that started with "_".  

Or maybe it was the other way 'round...

Anyway, the custom for using prefixed "_" to simulate separate
namespaces has been around for many, many years.

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