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    A bit like docstrings then ;-) Of course, Python has a handy mode to strip those, -OO, for those few who need it. Commented Aug 27, 2014 at 15:24
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    The space taken is by far the least important reason this convention stinks. It's a dozen bytes per name (per process). I feel like having wasted my time just reading the part of your answer pertaining to it, that's how unimportant it the space cost. Commented Aug 27, 2014 at 16:20
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    @delnan I agree about the memory size of the entries being meaningless, i was more thinkin gof the logical/mental space taken up, making introspective debugging and such require more reading and sorting, i would guess. I~LL Commented Aug 27, 2014 at 18:46
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    Actually, if you were this paranoid about space, you would notice that this saves space, and wastes time. The uninitialized members fall through to use the class value, and therefore there aren't a bunch of copies of the variable name mapped to None (one for each instance). So the cost is a few bytes at the class and the savings is a few bytes per instance. But each failing variable name search costs a tiny bit of time. Commented Aug 27, 2014 at 20:48
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    If you were worried about 8 bytes you wouldn't be using Python. Commented Apr 30, 2018 at 13:58