To delete a column in a DataFrame, I can successfully use:
del df['column_name']
But why can't I use the following?
del df.column_name
Since it is possible to access the Series via df.column_name, I expected this to work.
As you've guessed, the right syntax is
del df['column_name']
It's difficult to make del df.column_name work simply as the result of syntactic limitations in Python. del df[name] gets translated to df.__delitem__(name) under the covers by Python.