just as an initial comment, i think this is about the most
sensible/meaningful answer i've seen to my question so far...

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001 20:58:56 -0800 (PST), <brueckd@[...].com>  wrote:

> > as an aside, and i don't mean to sound obnoxious, but why did guido
> > not put in data hiding into python at an earlier stage?  my colleague
> > whose background on generic programming comes entirely from the STL
> > points this "wart" out as one of python's largest, and brings up the
> > good point that data hiding was well known to the OOP world at the
> > time of python's first incarnations.
> 
> "Well known" != "Always a Good Thing". Curly braces were also well-known
> then too, and I'm very glad Guido chose against using them. :)

ditto.  i realized a while back that tab indentation is ultimately an
enforcement of the Don't Repeat Yourself principle.  *all* good human
programmers indent code blocks, and to require delimiters for ease of
parsing is just duplicating that structural information to the
compiler.  duplication = source of bugs.  there is really no simpler
argument in favor of tabs.

> A better approach is to cater to mature programmers and to use processes
> that help other programmers mature too. A few places I've worked have used
> something like the following (and these work well for non-Python code
> too) and they really helped me:
----snip----
> We've used these guidelines and have had very few problems that you'd
> consider related to "data-hiding". When breakage occurs, we go look at the
> unittests (including the previous versions if needed) and compare it to
> the code that broke. If breakage is due to the library maintainer changing
> the documented use and behavior of the code, it's the maintainer's
> responsibility to fix the problem, provide a good upgrade path, etc.

this is a good approach.  the crux of the approach you outlined -
using unit tests as the primary API documentation - is really the sort
of answer i was looking for.  are there other, perhaps python-specific
practices which have worked well?

> Like I said, these worked for me and really helped me become more
> disciplined.

thanks for the info.


-peter
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