[Python-Dev] pydoc for named tuples is missing methods

[Eric Smith]

On 03/14/2011 10:02 PM, James Mills wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 11:50 AM, Terry Reedy<tjreedy at udel.edu>  wrote:
>>> How would that work if you had a field named "replace"? I think
>>> Raymond's current design is as good as it's going to get.
>>
>> 'as_dict' is an unlikely fieldname. 're_place' is too, but that just shift
>> the '_' from '_replace'. No gain. I might prefer _asdict to _as_dict, but
>> not enough to change.
>
> Probably a stupid idea (sorry) but one could just
> make asdict() and replace() public methods
> with the caveat that developers not use those
> as field names.

The field names are not always under direct control of the developer, 
such as when they are database column names. Not that using _replace 
completely gets rid of this problem, but I agree with Raymond's decision 
that a field name can be any valid identifier not starting with an 
underscore. It's the simplest thing for the developer using namedtuple.

Eric.