derived / base class name conflicts

[bruno at modulix]

christopherlmarshall at yahoo.com wrote:
(snip)
> So putting two underscores in front of an instance variable (or any
> identifier used inside the scope of a class statement) invokes a name
> mangling mechanism 

(snip)

> Is it commonplace to use underscores

I assume you mean double underscore...

> when defining derived class
> instance variables,
> or is this considered against the grain of python?

I don't know if it's 'commonplace', but that's something I only do when
I absolutely want to protect a given attribute of a base class from
being accidentally overriden by a derived class. Else I use the usual
convention ('_name' => implementation, 'name' => API), and assume users
 of my code will read the documentation (or the source FWIW) before
subclassing. Note that since 'users of my code' are mostly my coworkers
and I, this is a quite sensible assumption !-)

-- 
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in 'onurb at xiludom.gro'.split('@')])"