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

[Russ P.]

On Jan 27, 11:40 am, Luis Zarrabeitia <ky... at uh.cu> wrote:

> I think you still fail to see that what we are objecting is not that the
> original writer can "optionally" use the enforced data hiding (which, as
> someone pointed out before me, can be done with tools like pylint). The
> objection is about the _user_ of the library. If you don't force it into the
> _user_, how is it different from the current situation? And if you do force
> it, how can you say that it is optional?

As I have pointed out several times, the user cannot be forced to
respect data hiding if he has access to the source code (and the right
to modify it). If Python had a "private" keyword (or equivalent), for
example, the user would only need to delete it wherever necessary to
gain the desired access.