Public vs private¶

In python there's now strict separation for private/public methods or instance variables. The convention is to start the name of the method or instance variable with underscore if it should be treated as private. Private means that it should not be accessed from outside of the class.

For example, let's consider that we have a Person class which has age as an instance variable. We want that age is not directly accessed (e.g. changed) after the instance is created. In Python, this would be: