Python: Journey from Novice to Expert

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 ...