[swift-evolution] access control

[Ilya Belenkiy]

This a great writeup on clarity of intent. I’d like to add that in principle, if clarity of intent was the only goal, it could be achieved by a universally agreed on convention, like putting _ in front of the method or property (or type) . We could put it in guidelines and rely on it in all Swift projects. The other part that it is enforced by the compiler is equally important. The reasoning is the same as having real types instead of conventions for naming objects:

Imagine that the Swift compiler did nothing for types — it was just a useful way to convey the coder’s intent. Maintaining the code in this context would become much more difficult:

1) the compiler would not help catch mistakes.
2) the tools would not provide contextual auto completions or useful type related information in general

I am sure that everyone would be less comfortable shipping a large codebase that didn’t go through all the type checks. Exactly the same reasoning applies to “local”. If it’s just a convention that is not enforced by the compiler, we lose a very useful way to verify code correctness. In addition to that, everything that is marked as “local” (or “_” in front of the name)  now shows up in code completions and adds noise and temptation to cut corners (often this would be “faster” functions that already assume certain things about the state that may generally not be true). There are plenty of discussions about Cocoa private APIs on the web where the only thing that is stopping people is whether using them will pass the app store check (and if there is a secret back door still). That specific boundary is addressed with “internal”, but the same is true at the scale of a class.

> On Jan 25, 2016, at 11:22 PM, Rob Mayoff via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I agree with everything Matthew Johnson said in his response. In addition:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 5:40 PM, Taras Zakharko via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
> Personally, I use it quite often because of the way I like to design things as groups of tightly interdependent components (friends, if you want) who are aware of each other’s inner workings. I also want to have full access to the interface of any project I work on because I trust myself to make the judgement whether I am allowed to use a particular functionality or not.
> 
> By this logic, you don't want or need private (Swift's private-to-file) either. You just want/need internal and public, because you trust your judgement and you want access to everything in the project.
> 
> I trust my judgement, but I don't trust my memory. In six months, I won't remember every detail of the code I wrote today. Private-to-file is a message from past-me to future-me: "Dear future-Rob, you don't need to worry about looking for any use of this element outside this file, but if you want to make it visible to other files, you better study it to make sure it's safe to expose. Warmest regards, past-Rob."
> 
> This is a useful message. It helps jog future-Rob's memory, it saves future-Rob from bugs, and it lets past-Rob rest easy because the message is guaranteed to be delivered, and is guaranteed to be correct. No comment or policy or convention can make that guarantee.
> 
> I want the ability to send another useful message: "Dear future-Rob, you don't need to worry about looking for any use of this element outside this class, but if you want to make it visible to other classes, you better study it to make sure it's safe to expose. Very truly yours, past-Rob."
> 
> Note that moving a private class to its own file to make its privates more private does not work. Now I have to make the formerly-private class an internal class, so I'm not sending the first message anymore.
> 
> I'm not arguing that Swift needs, say, Scala's level of detail in its access modifiers, but I think an access modifier for private-to-class or private-to-instance or private-to-scope would let past-Rob convey useful information to future-Rob in a lot of places where currently the information is less precise or entirely absent, and that this ability is useful enough to justify the additional language complexity.
> 
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