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Python has very limited support for private variables using name mangling which is rarely used in practice as information hiding is seen by some as unpythonic, in that it suggests that the class in question contains unaesthetic or ill-planned internals. The slogan "we're all responsible users here" is used to describe this attitude.
In Python, if a name is intended to be "private", it is prefixed by one or two underscores. Private variables are enforced in Python only by convention. Names can also be suffixed with an underscore to prevent conflict with Python keywords. Prefixing with double underscores changes behaviour in classes with regard to name mangling.
Python's runtime does not restrict access to such attributes, the mangling only prevents name collisions if a derived class defines an attribute with the same name. On encountering name mangled attributes, Python transforms these names by prepending a single underscore and the name of the enclosing class, for example: >>>
An identifier I' (for variable X') masks an identifier I (for variable X) when two conditions are met I' has the same name as I; I' is defined in a scope which is a subset of the scope of I; The outer variable X is said to be shadowed by the inner variable X'. For example, the parameter "foo" shadows the local variable "foo" in this common pattern:
Prolog, for both atoms (predicate names, function names, and constants) and variables [20] Python, for variable names, function names, method names, and module or package (i.e. file) names [3] PHP uses SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE for class constants; PL/I [21] R, for variable names, function names, and argument names, especially in the tidyverse style ...
In a dynamically typed language, where type can only be determined at runtime, many type errors can only be detected at runtime. For example, the Python code a + b is syntactically valid at the phrase level, but the correctness of the types of a and b can only be determined at runtime, as variables do not have types in Python, only values do.
If a variable is only referenced by a single identifier, that identifier can simply be called the name of the variable; otherwise, we can speak of it as one of the names of the variable. For instance, in the previous example the identifier "total_count" is the name of the variable in question, and "r" is another name of the same variable.
In computer programming, variable shadowing occurs when a variable declared within a certain scope (decision block, method, or inner class) has the same name as a variable declared in an outer scope. At the level of identifiers (names, rather than variables), this is known as name masking .