Underscore data hiding (was python development practices?)

[Cliff Wells]

On Friday 02 November 2001 04:19, Steve Holden wrote:
> I don't see why. It's a documented part of the language, so a change would
> create backward incompatibility known to be anathema to the development
> team.

People keep insisting that the Python development team won't introduce 
changes that break backward compatability.  This may be true for the most 
part, but it is definitely not written in stone (or even Python).  From the 
2.0 docs for socket.bind():

"Bind the socket to address. The socket must not already be bound. (The 
format of address depends on the address family -- see above.) Note: This 
method has historically accepted a pair of parameters for AF_INET addresses 
instead of only a tuple. This was never intentional and is no longer be 
available in Python 2.0. "

There are a couple of other places (which I don't recall at the moment) where 
things were "fixed" in such a way that you would have to change existing 
code.  Granted this is a rather trivial example. However, I would definitely 
be wary of making my code depend upon something like the name-mangling scheme 
which is clearly a hack and actually seems a likely place to see a future 
change.

Regards,

-- 
Cliff Wells
Software Engineer
Logiplex Corporation (www.logiplex.net)
(503) 978-6726 x308
(800) 735-0555 x308