make them private

[fnrizzi]

No description provided.

[jtencer]

I'm fine with this change, but I think what it accomplishes is actually to make these methods public but in a different module. Rather than romtools.trial_space.tensor_to_matrix we now have romtools.tiral_space.utils.tensor_to_matrix. If we want to indicate that it's a private function, we should prepend an underscore to the name and place the function in the module that uses it.

[fnrizzi]

I thought that the distinction private public for us is just what is documented vs what is not.
These functions are omitted from being documented in pdoc.

I am happy to prepend underscore but that still does not make private :)

[jtencer]

"python private" I guess. There's not real privacy in python, but prepending an underscore prevents them from being imported with from romtools.trial_space.utils import * and is generally the convention for "keep out". I haven't used pdoc, but at least for sphinx and underscore has the same effect of omitting it from the documentation. Does moving them to utils only omit them from the documentation because we don't have any documentation for utils?

[jtencer]

Did some googling and it looks like pdoc ignores methods that start with _

I don't see anything in the docs which would make utils explicitly private.

[jtencer]

To clarify, I think it's OK to have these functions in utils and to have them be public but undocumented. I also think it's OK to make them private in the sense of adding an underscore. However, I do not think that we should have them in utils and have them be private because having them in utils requires that they be imported and used outside of the scope in which they're defined. If we make them private, we should make them private to the module in which they're used.

Does that make sense?

[eparish1]

I agree about prepending with the _. I think if we make these changes we are good.

[fnrizzi]

@jtencer @eparish1 free functions with prepended __ do not work. That works only for class methods.
So i opted to use a trailing _impl. I hope this is fine

[fnrizzi]

so @jtencer do you want me to make them private inside the file where they are used or leave them where they are ?

[jtencer]

I'm good with it now

[eparish1]

@fnrizzi please ping me if you'd like me to resolve the conflict.

[fnrizzi]

superseeded by #122