utility functions within a class?

[John Salerno]

Scott David Daniels wrote:
> John Salerno wrote:
>> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>>> ...   Single underscores are a convention/signal to the programmer that
>>> "this method/attribute" is considered "private" and should only be used
>>> by other methods within the class that defined it. The language does no
>>> enforcement of usage....
>>
>> I see. But isn't there something about a single leading underscore 
>> that doesn't import when you use from X import *? Or am I thinking of 
>> something else? Is that also the double underscore?
> 
> That has to do with module contents, and is a completely separate issue.
> If you define a module with a variable name '__all__' which is a list
> (or tuple) of strings, only module elements with those names will be
> imported with a "from module import *".  If you fail to define the
> '__all__' element, all names which do not start with an underscore will
> be imported.
> 
> --Scott David Daniels
> scott.daniels at acm.org

Thanks, that's what I was thinking of. So it doesn't apply to the 
contents within a class, just top-level contents?