Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:42:38 -0800, Russ P. wrote:

>> My my my. If you don't trust your programmers, then indeed, don't use
>> Python. What can I say (and what do I care ?). But once again, relying
>> on the language's access restriction to manage *security* is, well,
>> kind of funny, you know ?
> 
> Are you seriously saying that if you were managing the production of a
> major financial software package with hundreds of developers, you would
> just "trust" them all to have free access to the most sensitive and
> critical parts of the program? Now *that's*, well, kind of funny, you
> know?

I think this is a red-herring. Probably my fault -- I was the first one 
to mention access controls for banking software. I meant it as an analog 
to data hiding, rather than implying that one can or should use private/
protected attributes to implement data hiding.

Private attributes are a form of data hiding, but not all data hiding can 
be implemented as private attributes. 



-- 
Steven