> On Feb 14, 2017, at 9:31 PM, Chris Lattner via swift-evolution > <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote: > > Keeping with the spirit of Swift and staying consistent with its design, I > see two plausible meanings for private: > > Private could mean either: > 1) private to the file (Swift 2 semantics) > 2) accessible only to the current type/scope and to extensions to that type > that are in the current file. > > I don’t think we’ve ever evaluated and debated approach #2 systematically.
For what it's worth: I was opposed to SE-0025, but since I lost, I have tried to use `private` wherever it made sense, rather than fighting with the language. Sometimes, the change of keyword makes no difference. Other times, it's a hassle, because I have to switch between `private` and `fileprivate` as I redesign things, with little perceived benefit. I'd say the split between these is about 50/50. On a few occasions, I *have* genuinely appreciated the SE-0025 version of `private`. These involved cases where I wanted to ensure that instance variables were only manipulated in certain ways, using interfaces I had specifically designed to handle them correctly. For instance, I might have two parallel arrays, and I wanted to make sure that I only added or removed elements from both arrays at once. I could do this with `fileprivate` by splitting the type into two files, but it was more convenient to do it in one. In these cases, switching to #2 would *completely* defeat the purpose of using `private`, because the extensions would be able to directly manipulate the private instance variables. I would no longer gain any benefit at all from `private`. All of my uses would either fall into "makes no difference" or "it's a hassle". I do not support the idea of changing `private` to mean #2. Doing so would eliminate the few decent use cases I've found for `private`. Either keep it or drop it, but don't keep fiddling with it. -- Brent Royal-Gordon Architechies _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list swift-evolution@swift.org https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
