On Monday, April 02, 2012 13:26:05 Dmitry Olshansky wrote: > It's all nice and well, but I believe part of the reason of say private > protection is that user is never ever able to see(!) it. Thus it user > can't depend on private members being there, which is a good thing. > If I read it right, the technique you present allows user code to depend > on private functions being there. > I argue that we shouldn't even provide a _possibility_ for external > stuff to depend on private members. > Same argument in limited scope goes for protected.
As it stands, private has _no_ effect on symbol visibility. All it affects is symbol accessibility. For instance, if you create a private alias in a module, it affects every module that imports your module, or if you create a function which causes an overload conflict, it creates an overload conflict regardless of whether it's private or not. C++ is the same way. Access modifiers are just that, _access_ modifieres. They _only_ affect accessibility, not visibility. Now, there are a number of people very unhappy about this state of affairs and want private to hide symbols as well (personally, I think that the fact that it makes private aliases effectively useless is reason enough to seriously reconsider the current behavior), but I don't know if there's any real chance of convincing Walter or not. - Jonathan M Davis