Python design philosophy

[Gordon McMillan]

Eric Lee Green wrote:

>Steve Juranich wrote:
>> I am *brand* new to python (as of Sunday), and I just got to the
>> section in the tutorial about classes.  I was wondering why there
>> really isn't such an idea as a "private" member of classes? 
>
>Mostly because Python doesn't "really" have classes. What Python
>"really" has are hash tables whose entries are objects (either methods
>or other data objects), and some syntactic sugar [...]

By this logic, all C++ has is pointers and some syntactic sugar.

>This is one reason why inheritance is so efficient in Python, BTW. All
>inheritence does is add into the hash table for the overall class object
>those entries that were in the base class object. Then when you create a
>new instance, you actually are just creating a copy of the overall class
>object, without having to refer back to the base object(s). 


Not positive I understand what you're saying, but reality appears to 
contradict it:

>>> class A:
...  arg = 1
...
>>> class B(A):
...  barg = 2
...
>>> class C(B):
...  pass
...
>>> c = C()
>>> c.arg
1
>>> c.barg
2
>>> c.__class__.__bases__[0].__dict__
{'barg': 2, '__doc__': None, '__module__': '__main__'}
>>> c.__class__.__bases__[0].__bases__[0].__dict__
{'arg': 1, '__module__': '__main__', '__doc__': None}
>>>

- Gordon