Name mangling

[Fredrik Lundh]

ullrich at math.okstate.edu wrote:
>      But usually when I don't get something it's because
> I haven't found the right page in the docs. Here that's
> not the case - I don't see how the bit in the docs about
> name mangling says that the code above should not work.
> ???

section 9.6 in the tutorial discusses this:

    http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/node11.html

    "Any identifier of the form __spam (at least two
    leading underscores, at most one trailing under-
    score) is now textually replaced with
    _classname__spam, where classname is the
    current class name with leading underscore(s)
    stripped. This mangling is done without regard
    of the syntactic position of the identifier, so it
    can be used to define class-private instance
    and class variables, methods, as well as globals,
    and even to store instance variables private to
    this class on instances of other classes"

the language reference tells you that two leading under-
scores means class-private idenfifiers, but doesn't say
much more that that...

(send patches to python-docs at python.org!)

</F>

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