Private class and instance methods?

[Erik Max Francis]

How often do people use methods beginning with __ in order to get some
amount of privacy with the automatic name mangling that occurs, to get
some kind of weak protection, with, say, accessor methods:

    class C:
        def __init__(self, x):
            self.__x = x

        def getX(self): return self.__x
        def setX(self, x): self.__x = x

[which would of course allow C.getX and C.setX to do something different
in the future]?

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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