Protecting information with encapsulation
Encapsulation is the feature of the OOP paradigm that keeps has information protected. A class encapsulates its attributes and methods from being accessed by anyone outside the class. To ensure more protection to the variables and methods inside a class, they can further be declared as private or protected members. Private methods or variables can only be accessed within the class, whereas protected methods or variables can be accessed by subclasses or child classes that inherit the parent class or the base class. Private variables or methods are prefixed by the special character __ (double underscore) and protected members or variables are prefixed by _ (single underscore). We will look at some examples of private and protected class members.
Private members
In Python, the concept of a private variable does not exist as in other OOP languages. However, we can add two underscore symbols before the name of a variable or method to signify...