Class Inheritance - What am I doing wrong?

[Arnaud Delobelle]

Brian Munroe <brian.e.munroe at gmail.com> writes:

> Ok, so thanks everyone for the helpful hints.  That *was* a typo on my
> part (should've been super(B...) not super(A..), but I digress)
>
> I'm building a public API.  Along with the API I have a few custom
> types that I'm expecting API users to extend, if they need too.  If I
> don't use name mangling, isn't that considered bad practice (read not
> defensive programming) to not protect those 'private' fields?

The problem is that you are using name mangling for an attribute which
is accessed by several generations of a class hierarchy.  Name
mangling is only useful for attributes you *don't* want to share with
subclasses (or bases).

In python, use attributes starting with a single underscore (such as
_name).  It tells users that they shouldn't mess with them.  By
design, python doesn't include mechanisms equivalent to the Java / C++
'private'.

-- 
Arnaud