Hi,

I am designing a new computer language that is very similar to java. Like in java, you can declare some of the members in a class as private and, like java, the source code is always compiled to java bytecode.

But, for reasons I don’t want to get into here, when a member is explicitly declared as private in the source code in my language, the compiler will have to implicitly implement it as a package-access level member in bytecode! What I want to know is: would this bad for security? - would this make the members declared as private in the source code but implemented as package-access in bytecode more likely to be directly accessed in bytecode by malicious code made by computer hackers? (especially over the net).

I am no expert on computer security but my current thinking (which may be wrong) on this issue is that if the computer hacker has the power to directly access a bytecode package-access level class member then that hacker probably would have the power to directly access the same bytecode class member even if it was implemented a private member in bytecode (by, for example, simply changing the access specifier in the bytecode class file) and therefore it would make little difference to security! Please could someone put me right if I am wrong.

AndrewH:)