Properties, Attributes, and Different Types of Methods for Objects

All of the properties and functions of an object are public in Python, which is different from other languages where properties can be public, private, or protected. That is, there is no point in preventing caller objects from invoking any attributes an object has. This is another difference compared to other programming languages in which we can mark some attributes as private or protected.

There is no strict enforcement, but there are some conventions. An attribute that starts with an underscore is meant to be private to that object, and we expect that no external agent calls it (but again, nothing is preventing this).

Before jumping into the details of properties, it's worth mentioning some traits of underscores in Python, understanding the convention, and the scope of attributes.

Underscores in Python

There are some conventions and implementation details that make use of underscores in Python, which is an interesting topic that's worthy of analysis.

Like we mentioned previously, by default, all attributes of an object are public. Consider the following example to illustrate this: