On Friday, 4 September 2020 at 17:36:00 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
It's useful for serialization and, as you can see in your example, for debugging as well. `writeln` will print the values of the fields in a struct, even for private fields.
I wouldn't dispute that it is useful, but that's besides the point. If I declare something private, it's usually because I want to preserve certain invariants and I want the compiler to provide a guarantee that I don't accidentally violate them. As it stands, the compiler cannot guarantee that if I use tupleof.
I don't really have an issue with read-only access to private fields (but arguments could be made against it) and then serialization would still be possible. However, if my struct is supposed to maintain invariants, then any attempt at deserialization that naively reads from a tuple without establishing these invariants should fail to compile.
