TypeScript includes the keywords public, protected, and private to control access to the members of a class such as properties or methods. Public class members are visible from within and outside the class, protected are visible form the class and its descendants, and private are visible from within the class only. But being a superset of JavaScript, which doesn’t support the private keyword, using private members in TypeScript is not what you may expect.

Let’s look at the example of the class Person, which has three public and one private property.

class Person {
    public firstName: string;
    public lastName: string;
    public age: number;
    private ssn: string;

    constructor(firstName:string, lastName: string, age: number, ssn: string) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
        this.lastName = lastName;
        this.age = age;
        this.ssn = ssn;
    }
}

var p = new Person("John", "Smith", 29, "123-90-4567");

console.log("Last name: " + p.lastName + " SSN: " + p.ssn);

The TypeScript compiler properly reports an error at the last line where I tried to access the private variable ssn. Here’s the error:

“Error:(17, 53) TS2341: Property ‘ssn’ is private and only accessible within class ‘Person’.”

But this should have been marked as a warning, because the TypeScript compiler generates the JavaScript code anyway, which looks like this:

var Person = (function () {
    function Person(firstName, lastName, age, ssn) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
        this.lastName;
        this.age = age;
        this.ssn = ssn;
    }
    return Person;
})();

var p = new Person("John", "Smith", 29, "123-90-4567");
console.log("Last name: " + p.lastName + " SSN: " + p.ssn);

To see the code generation in action, visit the TypeScript Playground at http://bit.ly/1GKUeV0. As you see all traces of privacy have been removed, the property ssn has been exposed to the outside world as every other Property on the Person object.

Moreover, there is an easy workaround for accessing the “private” ssn even in TypeScript by casting this property to the type any:

console.log("Last name: " + p.lastName + " SSN: " + (p as any).ssn);

There must be some reason why creators of the TypeScript compiler didn’t turn the class Person into the JavaScript closure that would actually make ssn private, for example:

var Person = (function () {
    var _ssn;
    
    function Person(firstName, lastName, age, ssn) {
      
        this.firstName = firstName;
        this.lastName;
        this.age = age;
        _ssn = ssn;
    }
    return Person;
})();

But it is what it is. So when you use the private keyword in TypeScript, keep in mind that it just suggests you to be nice and not access it directly, but write public getter and setter methods instead.

Let’s extend the class Person like this:

class Employee extends Person{
    ssn: number;
}

TypeScript’s compiler will give you an error:

Error:(17, 53) TS2341: Property ‘ssn’ is private and only accessible within class ‘Person’.

But it’ll still generate the JavaScript code unless you add a compiler option –noEmitOnError to not generate JavaScript until all TypeScript syntax errors are fixed.

Having said that, I still like TypeScript. Developing in TypeScript is clearly more productive than in JavaScript. For more TypeScript articles go here.

P.S. IMO, protected variables are useless in any object–oriented language.