[Jeremy]
The access statement was experimental and went away. I guess it is the exception that proves the rule.
There are no exceptions to Guido's channeled rules <wink>: no *advertised* experimental feature has ever gone away and the access stmt was never documented ("advertised"). The closest it got was its NEWS entry for 0.9.9: * There's a new reserved word: "access". The syntax and semantics are still subject of research and debate (as well as undocumented), but the parser knows about the keyword so you must not use it as a variable, function, or attribute name. The "debate" mentioned there may have been limited to email between Guido and (IIRC) Tommy Burnette.
It was removed about the time I started using Python, so I don't know what it's intended use was.
access_stmt: 'access' NAME (',' NAME)* ':' accesstype (',' accesstype)* accesstype: NAME+ # accesstype should be ('public' | 'protected' | 'private') # ['read'] ['write'] # but can't be because that would create undesirable reserved words! So it was for creating attributes that could be written by the public but read only by class methods <wink>.
Many of the Python 2.2 features are also labeled experimental. And I don't expect that they will go away either.
Well, at least not the ones we've told people about. Barry's hack to make print << file, '%d' % i read an int i from file may well go away.