Solved: Question about idiomatic use of _ and private stuff.

[Steven W. Orr]

On Friday, Feb 23rd 2007 at 11:12 -0500, quoth Steven W. Orr:

=>I understand that two leading underscores in a class attribute make the 
=>attribute private. But I often see things that are coded up with one 
=>underscore. Unless I'm missing something, there's a idiom going on here.
=>
=>Why do people sometimes use one leading underscore?

I found the answer. It turns out that if you say:

import foo 

then you get access to all of the attributes that are not mangled. A 
single leading underscore does not cause mangling.

If you say 

from foo import _fooa, _foob, 

then the import will fail because the _ is used only by the import to 
decide that you shouldn't see _fooa or _foob.

-- 
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steveo at syslang.net