Will python never intend to support private, protected andpublic?

[Kent Johnson]

Mike Meyer wrote:
> Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:
> 
>>>>That's not what privilege separation means.  It means that the
>>>>privileged objects stay secure even when the unprivileged part of the
>>>>program is completely controlled by an attacker.
>>>
>>>In which case, what's "private" got to do with this? The examples I've
>>>seen of it don't give you privilege seperation any more than python does.
>>
>>If you have a java class instance with a private member that's (say) a
>>network socket to a special port, access to the port is controlled
>>entirely by that class.
> 
> 
> Are you sure? My understanding was that Java's introspection mechanism
> could be used to access private variables.

Yes, in a Java application with the default security manager it is trivial to access a private variable of another class using introspection. For example:

/* HasPrivate.java */

public class HasPrivate {
    private int myPrivate = 42;

}

/* HackPrivate.java */

import java.lang.reflect.Field;

public class HackPrivate {
    public static void main(String[] argv) throws Exception {
        HasPrivate hp = new HasPrivate();
        Field notSoPrivate = hp.getClass().getDeclaredField("myPrivate");
        notSoPrivate.setAccessible(true);
        System.out.println("myPrivate = " + notSoPrivate.getInt(hp));
    }
}

Kent