Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
Is there a way in Java to express that an attribute x of an object o can be accessed (I mean by dot notation o.x) only by o itself? To be clear: I’m talking about object-level access as in Smalltalk, not class-level access (thus private is not private enough)?
I’m sorry – I’m sure this has been asked many times before, but I seem to pick the wrong keywords when searching.
It is not possible in Java (nothing is more private than the fields marked as “private”), but if you think about it, it is also logical: you can modify private fields of other objects only in the common class source code, and if you control the class source code, you could do any bad or good things anyway.
BTW, you can access even private variables of other classes via reflection, if there is no security manager installed, or the policy of the security manager allows it, see this: Why is it allowed to access Java private fields via reflection?