barry@[...].com (Barry A. Warsaw) wrote:

> FWIW, the double-leading-underscore-no-trailing-double-underscore name
> mangling rule wasn't added specifically for data hiding.  It was so
> that a class that was designed to be subclassed could have a namespace
> that subclasses couldn't accidently trample on:

Interestingly, I often find that that the chosen mangling scheme
doesnt achieve that design goal. The scheme mangles the class name
into the underscore-stripped attribute name, which offers zero
protection if your base classes and subclasses have the same name.

Does this happen often? A common structure (for me, anyway) is to have
modules BaseWidget, FooWidget, and BarWidget, all of which define a
class Widget.



Toby Dickenson
tdickenson@[...].com
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