"petantik" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Perhaps a comprehensive protection for interpreted languages can never > be built because of their high level nature?
Nah. Compiling/interpreting is an implementation detail, and orthogonal to the issue of "high level". There are compilers for high level languages, and interpreters for low level languages. At the lowest level, a machine emulator is an interpreter for machine code, which is the lowest level most programmers deal with (at least I think it is....). If you really wanted "compiler-like" security for Python, you could write a Python compiler. There have been posts about a compiler that generated C++ recently, though it's still under development, and I haven't followed it closely. You might also consider retargetting one of the existing Python compilers to your architecture of choice, or to another language. You might also consider translating Python to a language with similar capabilities for which a compiler exists, like Common LISP. Of course, once you've got machine code, it doesn't matter how high level the source was. That may make getting the source back harder, but people who are cracking your program don't want to do that - they just want to find the place where the security happens, and either figure out the input that will make it happy, or invert the behavior after a test. <mike -- Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list