Migrating to perl?

[D-Man]

On Sat, Jan 06, 2001 at 08:21:44PM +0000, daniels at python.org wrote:
| 
| Actually, that's *mostly* true but not 100%. If you have a class data
| member with a name starts with two underscores, it will basically be a
| "private" variable, accessible within the class, but not directy
| readable outside of it. Example:
| 
|     class X:
|         def __init__(self):
|             self.a   = 100 # Public.
|             self.__b = 200 # Private, due to the two underscores.
|         def ChangeB(self, val):
| 	    self.__b = val # This still works fine.
| 
|     obj = X()
|     print obj.a      # Prints 100
|     obj.ChangeB(300) # This works fine.
|     print obj.__b    # Will throw an AttributeError.

As long as you realize that
      print obj._X__b
will work, making private in Python not really private anyways.  Of
course, this direct access will break polymorphism.

| 
| So in short, you can have private data members if you want, but from
| my own experience I've learned it isn't worth my time. Part of the
| Python philosophy seems to be to Keep It Simple whenver possible, and
| if I want to keep a data member of a class private, well, I just don't
| fiddle directly with "obj.a", is all. Hope this helps.

-D