Double underscores -- ugly?

[benhoyt]

Hi guys,

I've been using Python for some time now, and am very impressed with
its lack of red tape and its clean syntax -- both probably due to the
BDFL's ability to know when to say "no".

Most of the things that "got me" initially have been addressed in
recent versions of Python, or are being addressed in Python 3000. But
it looks like the double underscores are staying as is. This is
probably a good thing unless there are better alternatives, but ...

Is it just me that thinks "__init__" is rather ugly? Not to mention
"if __name__ == '__main__': ..."?

I realise that double underscores make the language conceptually
cleaner in many ways (because fancy syntax and operator overloading
are just handled by methods), but they don't *look* nice.

A solution could be as simple as syntactic sugar that converted to
double underscores behind the scenes. A couple of ideas that come to
my mind (though these have their problems too):

def ~init(self):  # shows it's special, but too like a C++ destructor
def +init(self):  # a bit too additive :-)
defop add(self, other):  # or this, equivalent to "def __add__"
def operator add(self, other):  # new keyword, and a bit wordy

Has anyone thought about alternatives? Is there a previous discussion
on this I can look up?

Cheers,
Ben.