unwritten rule I don't know if I'd call this (common) practice an unwritten rule in the Python world. rather, there's no real notion of visibility.. so the on

unwritten rule I don't know if I'd call this (common) practice an unwritten rule in the Python world. rather, there's no real notion of visibility.. so the only thing you can do to make something 'look private' is name it obscurely (i.e. the underscore prefix, as you mentioned) and leave it undocumented. it's perhaps my least favorite part of python module semantics.