Advanced Usage

Not-so-secret attributes

Named Maps use leading underscores to distinguish between user-defined attributes and developer-defined attributes [1]. This is a common convention, especially when implementing custom __setattr__ methods and is in fact how collections.namedtuple() does this.

Most people are responsible users, so if you would like to leverage this convention to provide additional attributes, you can do so:

>>> import maps
>>> RGB = maps.namedfrozen('RGB', ['red', 'green', 'blue'])
>>> lavender = RGB(230, 230, 250)
>>> lavender._is_purpleish = True
>>> lavender
RGB(red=230, green=230, blue=250)
>>> lavender._is_purpleish
True

[1]	In this context user refers to someone who uses Maps, whereas developer refers to someone who contributes to the Maps code-base