On 11/03/2010 01:47 AM, Ben Finney wrote: >> If someone wants to depend on some undocumented detail of the >> directory layout it's their problem (like people depending on bytecode >> and other stuff). > > I would say that names without a single leading underscore are part of > the public API, whether documented or not. I understand this reasoning, but I'd like to offer counter-examples. For instance, would you say that glob.glob0 and glob.glob1 are public API? They're undocumented, they're not in __all__, but they don't have a leading underscore either, and source comments call them "helper functions." I'm sure there is a lot of other examples like that, both in the standard library and in python packages out there. Other than the existing practice, there is the matter of esthetics. Accepting underscore-less identifiers as automatically public leads to a proliferation of identifiers with leading underscores, which many people (myself included) plainly don't like.
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