Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Russ P.]

On Jan 20, 10:24 pm, alex23 <wuwe... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 21, 3:20 pm, "Russ P." <Russ.Paie... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But I doubt it will ever come to pass, because it is clear that much
> > of the Python community has no clue about what is required for large-
> > scale, safety-critical software engineering.
>
> Okay, let me try a less snippy approach. How do you feel about
> metaclass techniques such as this one by Carl Banks?
>
> http://code.activestate.com/recipes/573442/
>
> This is pretty much what I had in mind when I said before that I
> believed such concerns could be addressed externally of the
> interpreter. Thankfully I thought to check Activestate before knocking
> up my own as proof-of-concept :)
>
> With Python 2.6/3.0 Carl's code could be easily (almost said
> 'trivially'...) extended to support the new __dir__ special method to
> exclude anything marked as private from the dir() results.

Looks interesting. If it can somehow be integrated into the language
as full-fledged feature, then I'd say it has potential. As I said
before, I am not looking for a hack or a quick fix. I am interested in
well-engineered data hiding that is fully supported as part of the
language. But I certainly appreciate Mr. Banks effort whether it ever
reaches that level or not.

[I am a bit confused though, because I seem to recall that Mr. Banks
claimed earlier in this thread that enforced data hiding is useless.]