Class design: accessing "private" members

[Jerome Quelin]

Hi all,

When designing a class, I wrote some accessors (get_var() and set_var()
methods) for my "private" members (private in the sense that I don't want
somebody to access them directly from outside the class.
I was wondering if it is good practice to acceed to those private members from
_inside_ my class, or should I use the accessors methods too?
Well, ok, it would be slower (function calls are always more expensive), but
isn't it more OO-well-behaviored?

-- File test.py
class Spam:
    def __init__(self, name="eggs"):
        self.set_name(name)  # Which is the
        self._name = name    # better/cleaner?
    def set_name(self, name):
        self._name = name
-- End of file

Thanks,
Jerome
--
jerome.quelin at insalien.org