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You're reading from  Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inAug 2015
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781784398781
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Dusty Phillips
Dusty Phillips
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Dusty Phillips

Dusty Phillips is a Canadian software developer and an author currently living in New Brunswick. He has been active in the open-source community for 2 decades and has been programming in Python for nearly as long. He holds a master's degree in computer science and has worked for Facebook, the United Nations, and several startups.
Read more about Dusty Phillips

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Adding behavior to class data with properties


Throughout this book, we've been focusing on the separation of behavior and data. This is very important in object-oriented programming, but we're about to see that, in Python, the distinction can be uncannily blurry. Python is very good at blurring distinctions; it doesn't exactly help us to "think outside the box". Rather, it teaches us to stop thinking about the box.

Before we get into the details, let's discuss some bad object-oriented theory. Many object-oriented languages (Java is the most notorious) teach us to never access attributes directly. They insist that we write attribute access like this:

class Color:
    def __init__(self, rgb_value, name):
        self._rgb_value = rgb_value
        self._name = name

    def set_name(self, name):
        self._name = name
    
    def get_name(self):
        return self._name

The variables are prefixed with an underscore to suggest that they are private (other languages would actually force them...

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Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition
Published in: Aug 2015Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781784398781

Author (1)

author image
Dusty Phillips

Dusty Phillips is a Canadian software developer and an author currently living in New Brunswick. He has been active in the open-source community for 2 decades and has been programming in Python for nearly as long. He holds a master's degree in computer science and has worked for Facebook, the United Nations, and several startups.
Read more about Dusty Phillips