You can do this in Python as well. Check out the property built-in function. One can declare a property with a get, set, and delete method. Here's a small example of a read-only property.
class Test(object): def getProperty(self): return 0; prop = property(fget = getProperty) t = Test() print t.prop t.prop = 100 # this will fail -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list