A single underscore is just a naming convention, but double underscores triggers automatic name-mangling of the variable in question:

$ cat test.py
class foo:
        def __init__(self, x):
                self.__x = x

f = foo(1)
f.__x
$ python3 test.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/mnt/d/test.py", line 6, in <module>
    f.__x
AttributeError: 'foo' object has no attribute '__x'

However, much like private/protected variables in java, this is pretty trivial to circumvent if you want.

But I don’t believe that you can argue that access modifiers are required for OO not to be shoehorned into a language, not when influential OO languages like Smalltalk didn’t have this feature either. Java just happens to be closer to C++, where public/private/protected is much more rigidly enforced than either Java or Python

In what way does OOP feel shoehorned in with Python? I ask since that is not my own impression of the language.

Would you also be willing to share what language(s) you feel do(es) OOP without it being shoehorned in?

Unix shell scripts are one of the few holdouts.

I don’t know if this applies to other shells, but bash will not only execute your script line-by-line, it will also read it line-by-line. Which means that you can modify the behavior of a running script by editing lines that have not yet been executed*. It’s absolutely bonkers, and I’m sure that it has caused more than one system failure, during upgrades.

* For example, if you run the following script

echo "hello"
sleep 5
echo "goodbye"

and then edit the third line before the 5 second sleep has elapsed, then the modified line will be executed.

It is normal usage. Though personally I’d probably make another “main” function, to avoid declaring a bunch of global variables