Origin of double underscore convention?
Grant Edwards
grant at nowhere.
Thu Jan 6 17:25:51 EST 2000
In article <Y96d4.1764$oF2.5206 at ozemail.com.au>, Jason Stokes wrote:
>I'm relatively new to Python. This is possibly a dumb question, but
>I'm wondering about the double underscore convention to mark an inbuilt
>or internal method. I find it pretty ugly and I'm wondering if it was
>chosen for any historical reason, eg analogy to another language.
Some C compilers used to prefix all user-declared variables
with "_". That way they would never collide with assembly
language variables as long as the assy lang didn't use variables
that started with "_".
Or maybe it was the other way 'round...
Anyway, the custom for using prefixed "_" to simulate separate
namespaces has been around for many, many years.
--
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at a new disco!
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