Use of prefixing double underscore is called name mangling: (from the Python docs):
Any identifier of the form
__spam
(at least two leading underscores, at most one trailing underscore) is textually replaced with_classname__spam
, where classname is the current class name with leading underscore(s) stripped. This mangling is done without regard to the syntactic position of the identifier, so it can be used to define class-private instance and class variables, methods, variables stored in globals, and even variables stored in instances. private to this class on instances of other classes.
Note that single underscore prefix is used to indicate that the variable / function / class should be private (although that is not strictly enforced)