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

Russ P. Russ.Paielli at gmail.com
Sun Jan 25 15:01:16 EST 2009


On Jan 25, 10:04 am, Mark Wooding <m... at distorted.org.uk> wrote:

> > But what if I want an automatic check to verify that I am using it as
> > the author intended? Is that unreasonable?
>
> You mean that you can't /tell/ whether you typed mumble._seekrit?
> You're very strange.  It's kind of hard to do by accident.

But what if you type "mumble._seekrit" in several places, then the
library implementer decides to give in to your nagging and makes it
"public" by changing it to "mumble.seekrit". Now suppose you forget to
make the corresponding change somewhere in your code, such as

mumble._seekrit = zzz

You will get no warning at all. You will just be inadvertently
creating a new "private" attribute -- and the assignment that you
really want will not get done.

For that matter, the library implementer himself could make the same
mistake and get no warning.

When you think about it, you soon realize that the leading underscore
convention violates the spirit if not the letter of one of the first
principles of programming 101: if you have a constant parameter that
appears in several places, assign the literal value in one place
rather than repeating it everywhere. Then if you need to change the
value, you only need to change it in one place. That reduces effort,
but more importantly it reduces the potential for error.

The same principle applies to "declaring" an attribute private. If
that "declaration" is encoded in every occurrence of its identifier,
then if you decide to change it to public, you need to change the
identifier at each and every location. But if a "private" or "priv"
keyword were available, you would only need to make the change in one
location.



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