Pseudo-Private Class Attributes

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ricardo_Ar=E1oz?=]

That is self.__attributes

Been reading about the reasons to introduce them and am a little
concerned. As far as I understand it if you have a class that inherits
from two other classes which have both the same name for an attribute
then you will have a name clash because all instance attributes "wind up
in the single instance object at the bottom of the class tree".

Now I guess this means that in any real OOP project you'd better use
__attr for all your attributes, because classes are usually meant to be
subclassed and you can never know when you'll be subclassing from two
classes with attributes with the same name, and I guess you can't take
the risk of this happening because when it happens it will be hell to
find out what's going on.

Is this right?

 

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Ricardo Aráoz a écrit :

That is self.__attributes

Been reading about the reasons to introduce them and am a little
concerned. As far as I understand it if you have a class that inherits
from two other classes which have both the same name for an attribute
then you will have a name clash because all instance attributes "wind up
in the single instance object at the bottom of the class tree".

Now I guess this means that in any real OOP project you'd better use
__attr for all your attributes, because classes are usually meant to be
subclassed and you can never know when you'll be subclassing from two
classes with attributes with the same name, and I guess you can't take
the risk of this happening because when it happens it will be hell to
find out what's going on.

Is this right?

Wild guess : you're coming from Java or C++ ?-)

I don't know for sure what you mean by "real OOP project", but any
non-trivial Python project surely qualifies IMHO, and it seems that so
far no one had too much problem with this, so you're perhaps needlessly
worrying.

Note that given Python's type system, inheritence is mostly about
implementation - you don't need it for polymorphic dispatch. This
results in class hierarchies being way much flatter in Python than in
languages with declarative static typing - IOW, Python's classes are not
necessarily "meant to be subclassed".

Also, while Python does support multiple inheritance, it's rarely used
in practice (except perhaps in Zope 2, which is that pythonic). Python
has great support for delegation, so composition/delegation is often
used where MI would have been used in C++.

FWIW, __private names are of very rare use in Python. As far as I'm
concerned, I must have use this feature a couple of times at most, in
base classes or metaclasses of a small framework, because these couple
attributes where really vital to the sytem and should by no mean be
overloaded.

My 2 cents.