nesting class definitions?

[Martin von Loewis]

Gerrit Holl <gerrit.holl at pobox.com> writes:

> Ah, but what I meant was:
> 
> class Jan:
>     class Piet:
>         ...
>     class Henk:
>         ...
> 
> Is there any point in using this feature?

I've seen it used in the Gnome libglade Python module, for
encapsulation reasons: The name started with __, so the only way to
create instances of this class was from inside methods of the outer
class (or by knowing how __ names are translated). I feel they should
have better used a module-scoped class, starting with an underscore
(so from libglade import * would not import it).

Another example is in the threading module's test() function, where
classes are nested inside functions; the same happens in copy._test.

profile.Profile has a nested class fake_code, again for hiding
purposes. Whether the use is justified is up to the reader.

Regards,
Martin