[swift-evolution] [Accepted] SE-0169: Improve Interaction Between `private` Declarations and Extensions

[Nevin Brackett-Rozinsky]

I am glad that “private” will become usable again in Swift 4. This
eliminates most of the pain caused by “fileprivate”.

However, I do not understand why this solution was chosen over renaming the
keywords. The discussion of alternatives here does not mention it, and the
only explanation given after SE-0159 is that renaming would cause “churn”.
Yet that renaming would be completely automatable by a migrator with no
change to semantics, whereas SE-0169 will require developers to manually
investigate each occurrence of “private” to see if the new meaning is still
appropriate, and introduce helper types to hide implementation details
where it is not.

Furthermore, I remain concerned that the mere act and fact of defining
“private” specifically to hide implementation details from other types in
the file will lead developers to put unrelated types together in a single
file, because that appears to be the intended purpose of the keyword.

At a meta-level, since mistakes like SE–0025 will be much more costly in
the source-stable future, we ought to consider adding a step to the Swift
Evolution process whereby accepted proposals are implemented in a beta
version of Swift, and a second review period can happen if new problems
become apparent in actual usage that were unforeseen during the initial
discussion. That way we are much more likely to catch emergent issues
before release.

Nevin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170417/45c1676f/attachment.html>