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Single leading dash in member variable names?

Ian Kelly ian.g.kelly at gmail.com
Tue Sep 11 17:32:29 EDT 2012 
On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 2:53 PM,  <e.doxtator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 11, 2012 2:06:45 PM UTC-5, Ian wrote:
>> Single leading underscore is a convention indicating that the name
>> should be considered private and not used externally.  It's a softer
>> version of the double leading underscore that means basically the same
>> thing but has syntactic significance.
>
> Thank you!
>
> PEP 8 says this is bad form.  What do you think?

Where are you seeing that?  It says:

Use one leading underscore only for non-public methods and instance
> variables.
>
> To avoid name clashes with subclasses, use two leading underscores to
> invoke Python's name mangling rules.
>
> ... Generally, double leading underscores should be used only to avoid
> name conflicts with attributes in classes designed to be subclassed.
>

So a single leading underscore is the preferred style for non-public
methods and attributes.
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