Reserved classes of identifiers

Certain classes of identifiers (besides keywords) have special meanings. These classes are identified by the patterns of leading and trailing underscore characters:

_name #

_name (single leading underscore)

Not imported by “from module import *”.

Also the special identifier “_” is used in the interactive interpreter to store the result of the last evaluation; it is stored in the __builtin__ module. When not in interactive mode, “_” has no special meaning and is not defined. See import.

Note: The name “_” is often used in program code in conjunction with internationalization; refer to the documentation for the gettext module for more information on this convention.

__name__ #

__name__ (double leading and trailing underscores)

System-defined names. These names are defined by the interpreter and its implementation (including the standard library); applications should not expect to define additional names using this convention. The set of names of this class defined by Python may be extended in future versions. See special-method-names.

__name #

__name (double leading underscores)

Class-private names. Names in this category, when used within the context of a class definition, are re-written to use a mangled form to help avoid name clashes between private attributes of base and derived classes. See identifiers.