Ask HN: What is encapsulation in Python?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880778

by xcoding • 10 years ago

5 3 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

bjw181• 10 years ago

What is encapsulation in any language? Put simply, we encapsulate mainly to prevent mistakingly altering data. For example, private methods and variables.

    Class Foo:
        def __init__(self):
            self.__im_private()
    
        def bar(self):
            print('baz')

        def __im_private(self):
            print('back off, I can only be called by the class')

xcoding• 10 years ago

Could you elaborate?

probinso• 10 years ago

Encapsulation in object oriented programming is a term we use to describe joining of conceptual topics. A class generally models a conceptual topic, the data and methods on the class allow a clean interface to operations from that topic.

This extends the idea that 'the existence of a public method acts a documentation for what you can do with a object`. The existence of private methods and data are only to the benefit of the developer of the class.

Python's standards for encapsulation are a little different, because you cannot hide methods and data the same way you would with other languages. This is made apparent with public interfaces to private methods like in .__iter__(self): methods.

Ask HN: What is encapsulation in Python?

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