On Sunday, October 6, 2002, at 12:57 AM, Noah White wrote:
>>
>>> Note that an alternate definition of "private" is often used, as
>>> follows:
>>>
>>> A "private" attribute is an attribute whose scope is restricted
>>> such that
>>> it may be accessed only within the class in which it has been
>>> declared,
>>> OR WITHIN ANY CLASS THAT INHERITS FROM THAT CLASS.
>>
>> I'll agree with that.
>>
>
> ACK! After re-reading this I about puked. No, that notion of private
> would not be something I'd agree with :-) That's more like protected.
As I think I've mentioned once before, and will again as Eiffel's been
mentioned recently...
Is there any chance Perl6 could simply avoid the can of worms that is
public/private/protected and have a single accessibility property? It
would seem to clean the debate up handily, and provides even greater
flexibility for programmers. Along the lines of:
class Foo {
attr $.bar is accessible(Bar, Baz);
# Makes $.bar attribute accessible only to the Bar and Baz classes.
attr $.baz is accessible(Foo);
# Protected
attr $.hello is accessible(None);
# explicitly Private
attr $.world is accessible(Any);
# Public
}
Of course, if Perl6 went down this road, Ruby-ish read, write, or
read/write attributes would also be nice. I might want to let another
class read an attribute, but not write to it, while I might for some
reason want another class to be able to write to an attribute, but not
read it. But maybe I'm just weird that way. :-)
