accessing class data members

[Curtis Jensen]

In many OO languages, and theory, it is often the case that when you
want to know the value of some data member, that a function is written
to return that value.  However, in Python it seems that people just
access the data member directly.

for example:
if there were a class that represented a physical object.  In the class
there were data members that held the objects temperature and location. 
If I wanted to know the temperature of an object, I could just use
obj.temperature.  Though in other languages, the convention seems to
call a function that returns the value, like: obj.get_temperature.

Which is better?

-- 
Curtis Jensen
cjensen at bioeng.ucsd.edu
http://www-bioeng.ucsd.edu/~cjensen/
FAX (425) 740-1451