Why does python not have a mechanism for data hiding?

[Paddy]

On May 24, 3:14 pm, Fuzzyman <fuzzy... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 24, 2:58 pm, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-s... at benfinney.id.au>
> wrote:
>
> > Sh4wn <luckyluk... at gmail.com> writes:
> > > first, python is one of my fav languages, and i'll definitely keep
> > > developing with it. But, there's 1 one thing what I -really- miss:
> > > data hiding. I know member vars are private when you prefix them with
> > > 2 underscores, but I hate prefixing my vars, I'd rather add a keyword
> > > before it.
>
> > From whom are you trying to hide your attributes?
>
> Actually, 'data hiding', although vastly overused by the static crowd
> can be a reasonable thing to want.
>
> For example, at Resolver Systems we expose the spreadsheet object
> model to our users. It hasa public, documented, API - plus a host of
> undocumented internally used methods.
>
> We would really *much* rather hide these, because anything our
> customers start using (whether documented or not) we will probably
> have to continue supporting and maintaining.
>
> The 'we told you not to use that' approach, when applied to paying
> customers doesn't really work... all they see is that you broke their
> spreadsheet code by changing your API.

"We told you not to use it in the API Docs"
"Those names with leading undoerscores means _DO_NOT_USE_IT"
"THose methods whose docstrings say DO NOT USE EXTERNALLY"

And if they still use them, then they'd be problematic no matter what
language was used.

Customers ey?
Can't live without 'em...
... Actually that's customers Sir!

:-)

- Paddy.