Why does python not have a mechanism for data hiding?

[Russ P.]

On Jun 4, 4:29 am, NickC <ncogh... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 4, 4:09 am, "Russ P." <Russ.Paie... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What is it about leading underscores that bothers me? To me, they are
> > like a small pebble in your shoe while you are on a hike. Yes, you can
> > live with it, and it does no harm, but you still want to get rid of it.
>
> With leading underscores, you can see *at the point of dereference*
> that the code is accessing private data. With a "this is private"
> keyword you have no idea whether you're accessing private or public
> data, because the two namespaces get conflated together.

That is true. But with the "priv" keyword you'll discover quickly
enough that you are trying to access private data (as soon as you run
the program). And even if a "priv" keyword is added, you are still
free to use the leading underscore convention if you wish.

The idea of being able to discern properties of an object by its name
alone is something that is not normally done in programming in
general. Yes, of course you should choose identifiers to be
descriptive of what they represent in the real world, but you don't
use names like "intCount," "floatWeight," or "MyClassMyObject" would
you? Why not? That would tell you the type of the object at the "point
of dereferencing," wouldn't it?