Thank you all for the confirmation and the suggestions (including the tangential ones: I didn't know one could remove your his own posts!).
As much as I really like Python (which I've been using full-time only for the past two months) I really wish it did have regular private/ protected/public methods. I'm building an application that can be extended by the users and I really wish there was a solid way to prevent them from accessing parts of the application that they shouldn't access or to provide read-only access. I.e. right now I'm working on the graphical client which potentially could be rewritten entirely by the users. It is necessary and perfectly reasonable for the client module to access some of the objects to be represented graphically, but those objects shouldn't be modifiable by it. I now wonder, would developing the graphical client as an entirely separate application, communicating with the server via the localhost network interface and messages, solve the problem? Would it keep the objects of the two applications (server/client) entirely separate? Manu -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list