Users of namedtuple: do you use the _source attribute?

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/17/2017 10:27 PM, Rick Johnson wrote:
> On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 12:20:04 PM UTC-5, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
>> collections.namedtuple generates a new class using exec,
>> and records the source code for the class as a _source
>> attribute.  Although it has a leading underscore, it is
>> actually a public attribute. The leading underscore
>> distinguishes it from a named field potentially called
>> "source", e.g. namedtuple("klass", ['source',
>> 'destination']).
> 
> Although i understand the reasoning behind using the leading
> underscore, the Python devs should have realized that anyone
> who follows Pythonic convention [1] will ignore a symbol
> that starts with an underscore . So if the intention is that
> `_source` should be a part of the public API, then
> obviously, defining it in "standardized private form" is
> very unwise.
> 
> But to answer your question, no, none of my code relies on
> the `_source` attribute. So i really don't care what happens
> to it.
> 
> [1] Which i would hope is a rather large group, and not just
> another "Rick singleton".

Yes, No.  The developers of the class agree that a trailing underscore 
convention would have been better.  'source_' etc.


-- 
Terry Jan Reedy