Bad form to access a *private variable* like _foo?

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

seberino at spawar.navy.mil a écrit :
> Bad form to access a *private variable* like _foo?

In this case, this would be spelled "protected" - or even better 
"implementation". And the contract is: nothing prevent you to access 
implementation attributes, but then you're on your own if anything breaks.

> The reason I'm asking is that TurboGears/SQLObject mobel objects have
> an attribute called "_connection" that must be used to manually commit
> database stuff....
> 
> e.g.  MyObject._connection.commit()
> 
> It bugs me.  I don't know if it is a stylistic faux pas or not.
 >
> Is it?

The way you wrote it here, yes. If there's no official way to do the 
same operation and you have a real use case for it - in which case you 
may want to add a commit() method to SQLObject's model base class and 
submit the patch to SQLObject's maintainer. But I strongly suspect 
there's a better way to handle this case in SQLObject's API.