Put an underscore in front of private methods. Personally I never put an underscore in front of private properties, because I think that all public properties should have accessor methods, or better yet, everything that an object should do should be available using methods.

There are a couple of advantages to doing it that way:

• Methods have a nice inheritance mechanism, properties don't.
• Method implementations can be changed, but properties have to stay the same to be compatible.
• It's usually easier to think up an interface using methods, and then worry about implementing them. In my experience, this makes for a much more useful object design too.

By the way, it is very likely that your 'private' properties are accessible by other code. Don't worry about it, just don't document it.

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.
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