First of all, the reason that private members can be hacked in C++ because of pointers. I don't know Java, so I don't know how it's possible there. But Python doesn't have pointers and getattr, settatr can be adjusted to work with private members. The only way the hack is possible if someone wrote a Extension module in which they would get a PyObject* as a parameter and from there they would manually get the attribute variable using pointer and then return the value. Therefore if private is implemented in Python it would be more secure than private in other OOPs.
The benefit of private is actually debugging. If somehow, someone finds that the private member has changed they would immediately know that it was a memory leak or the value was changed through a set method defined in the class (This is one of most important pillar of access modifiers in OOP). Python's private convention most of the time helps but since it doesn't enforce it someone just might introduce a bug in an application by modifying a private member. I just gave an example of security it was not the main point. The main aim of private is to avoid modifying not accessing. I know @property can be used to turn a member variable into a non-modifiable member variable but that also means you can't change it inside the class also. When applying private on functions, I think that's when it becomes private. You're hiding interfaces when you don't need to. In fact hiding interfaces is worse than hacking. Functions can't be hacked. Conclusion ------------ Therefore I actually kind of change my suggestion to introduce a new keyword that avoids modifying member variables from outside the class not the inside. This would preserve @property behavior plus introducing a new kind of behavior. Also this member variables would be inherited. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/426EPANCVEGZV2AZL7MWNG67BTZMORNG/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
