[XML-SIG] Ugh! Why are DOM access methods spelled with a leading '_'?

[Jim Fulton]

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> "Fred L. Drake, Jr." wrote:
> >
> > ...
> >
> >  > Is there are description somewhere of the Python DOM mapping,
> >  > other than the DOM sources?
> >
> >   The W3C documentation gives the IDL mapping, which requires the
> > Python specific mapping.
> 
> Actually, the DOM can be mapped into a language in a manner that does
> not follow directly from the IDL and CORBA specs. That's why there is a
> formally defined java binding rather than just a reference to the IDL
> specs. Historically, though, 4DOM was really a CORBA tool so it really
> needed to follow the specs.

Whatever we do, there needs to be a document somewhere that
says what the Python DOM mapping is, even if it is not
much more than a reference to the DOM IDL and the Python
binding. 

> I would vote for losing the leading underscore.

:)
 
> > This says to me that the DOM API specifies use of methods
> > for interface attributes.
> 
> I think it is safe to say that a binding should not require a particular
> underlying data structure but Python allows the use of a.b syntax even
> when the surface structure is wildly different than the underlying data
> structure. I'm preaching to the choir as you are the world leader in
> abuse of the dot notation. :)

Yup, however __getattr__ is a pain to utilize unless you have alot of 
infrustructure.  Zope has support for computed attributes, which makes 
this pretty sane, especially for read-only attributes.  I'm working on
a new version of StructuredText, StructuredText NG, 
http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/StructuredTextWiki/StructuredTextNG, 
which, among other things, creates objects with a DOM interface.
I want this to be independent of Zope, so I can't use any of the standard
Zope getattr tricks. 

In general, I think it would be cool of lots of
objects supported the DOM interface and I hate to make people 
jump over the getattr barrier to do that.  
 
Jim

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