Issue 12086: add example showing how to use name mangling.

This commit is contained in:
Raymond Hettinger 2011-06-25 16:31:06 +02:00
commit 142d0f5e5a
1 changed files with 22 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -595,6 +595,28 @@ current class name with leading underscore(s) stripped. This mangling is done
without regard to the syntactic position of the identifier, as long as it
occurs within the definition of a class.
Name mangling is helpful for letting subclasses override methods without
breaking intraclass method calls. For example::
class Mapping:
def __init__(self, iterable):
self.items_list = []
self.__update(iterable)
def update(self, iterable):
for item in iterable:
self.items_list.append(item)
__update = update # private copy of original update() method
class MappingSubclass(Mapping):
def update(self, keys, values):
# provides new signature for update()
# but does not break __init__()
for item in zip(keys, values):
self.items_list.append(item)
Note that the mangling rules are designed mostly to avoid accidents; it still is
possible to access or modify a variable that is considered private. This can
even be useful in special circumstances, such as in the debugger.