[swift-evolution] [Discussion] A Problem With SE-0025?

[Jonathan Hull]

My understanding of the proposal was that the unannotated properties/methods inside of a scope have the same *visibility* as their surrounding scope, or internal, whichever is less.

That is slightly different than having the same access level.  Thus:

private struct Outer {
	var inner:Int
}

is different than:

private struct Outer {
	private var inner:Int
}

In the first, inner is accessible precisely everywhere where Outer is accessible.  In the second, inner is only accessible within Outer itself.  It is important that we have the first behavior for unannotated inner, because there is no other way to spell it.

That is my understanding of the intent of SE-0025, even if the exact wording is confusing.

Thanks,
Jon

P.S.  I would personally like to see unannotated properties/methods inside of a scope have the same visibility as their surrounding scope. Full stop. End of sentence.  (It seems to me like the special handling of internal is what is causing the confusion here).  That is what I would expect the behavior to be if I didn’t know.  That isn’t what was written in the proposal though...

> While implementing SE-0025 (fileprivate), I noticed an interesting bug in the proposal.  Under the implementation outlined there, any top-level structure, class, or enum declared private cannot possibly be instantiated and so cannot be used in any way.  Because of this, private top-level declarations are more often than not blown away entirely by the compiler for being unused.  It seems strange to me to allow a key language feature to act solely as a hint to the optimizer to reduce the size of your binary.  Perhaps the restrictions around private needs to be relaxed or the line between fileprivate and private needs to be investigated again by the community before inclusion in the language.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> ~Robert Widmann

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