[swift-evolution] Simplifying Access Using 'Hidden'

[Karl Wagner]

> On 13 Feb 2017, at 17:21, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> People talk always like “I never liked fileprivate” and I feel like some of you forgot that fileprivate is not new to Swift. It’s the repainted private from days before Swift 3. I cannot recall anyone complaining about it that much. There were some people that forced the addition of a stricter private access modifier for Swift 3. Now that we have both, there are a lot of complains about fileprivate.
> 
> 
It _is_ kind of ugly. I would support rearranging our access lives like this, with a parameterised “private”:

open
public
private(module) // today’s “internal”
private(file)   // today’s “fileprivate”
private         // today’s “private”

It also opens the door to more nuanced access levels, such as private(type) to allow access to the hidden member in cross-file extensions but not generally throughout the module.

For properties, it would mean 

public internal(set) var something: Bool

would become 

public private(module, set) var something: Bool

at which point it might be nicer to flip the arguments and call it “setter”:

public private(setter, module) var something: Bool

- Karl
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