Origin of double underscore convention?

[Jason Stokes]

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.  I
know C programmers sometimes use the underscore convention.

-- 
Jason Stokes: jstok at bluedog.apana.org.au