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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

I am pro-snake myself, but those that use double underscores, especially in a meaningful way, are drilling holes in our boat.

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I don't hate leading underscores on _private_function or _class variable, in fact I think it's a great way to semantically signal intent

The double underscore for __super_private_function doesn't make much sense to me though. I can't see a reason why this shouldn't just be a single underscore, especially when __double_underscore__ signals very important python internals

The leading double underscore functions differently from a leading single underscore in this case:

> Any identifier of the form __spam (at least two leading underscores, at most one trailing underscore) is textually replaced with _classname__spam, where classname is the current class name with leading underscore(s) stripped.

See https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/classes.html#private-vari...

What is a double underscore?

    hello__world?

Yep, or "dunder" as it's often called in the python world.

__special_functions__

__privateish_variable

Etc, in the land of Python

I wish Python enforced private attributes. I once worked in a codebase where this was roughly true:

  _usually_private_but_ok_to_access_if_you_are_knowledgeable
  __private_unless_you_need_an_escape_hatch
  ___absolutely_private_except_for_a_few_times

I mean doesn’t it make you want to make ___________super_ultra_private, with an accessor that corrupts the filesystem and hangs if you so much as look at it?

That sounds good, but we might need a class attribute that disables filesystem corruption in case we need to access `___________super_ultra_private` somewhere

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