[swift-evolution] [swift-evolution-announce] [Review] SE-0159: Fix Private Access Levels

[Drew Crawford]

On March 23, 2017 at 12:32:38 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon (brent at architechies.com) wrote:

To what extent could your need for safety be satisfied by (a) giving the property a long, unique name like `unsafeUnsynchronizedT`, and (b) writing a very small unit test/shell script/Perl script which makes sure references to that very unique name only appear between the two "MARK:" comments?
A third-party linter to get a scoped feature is our current candidate for reimplementing this feature if it's dropped from Swift.

However, I think it's worth asking to what extent it makes sense to build a language that gets fixed with linters.  For example Swift could have used a linter for typechecking (Python is doing this) but the benefits of compile-time typechecking affect a large number of programs and so we decided to ship with batteries included.

The scoped visibility is like the type system.  It is a compile-time check that is used to catch threading, information disclosure, encapsulation violation, or similar bugs.  These are problems that affect a large number of programs, we should ship with batteries included.

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