On Wednesday, May 16, 2018 02:39:22 KingJoffrey via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On Tuesday, 15 May 2018 at 21:05:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > > Though if someone expects to be able to just jump into any > > language and use it without reading up on how it works, they're > > just shooting themselves in the foot. And surprisingly often, > > that seems to be how many folks operate. > > And that comment is a little unfair don't you think?
Is it? How many programmers just start trying to program in D without actually reading much of anything about it? We not only have the spec but multiple books on the language - some of which are available for free - and yet plenty of programmers (regardless of the language) seem to think that they can just start programming in a language and only look up stuff when they run into a problem and yet expect to have that work well without running into serious problems. Anyone taking that approach is just begging for trouble. Obviously, not everyone does that, but a suprisingly large number of programmers seem to. We try to help such folks when they do ask questions, but plenty of questions that get asked clearly show that the person asking the question has not studied the language much at all. > The best clarification I can find, regarding how D treat's > private, is from this tiny little sentence (from which, I assume, > the programmer is now meant to understand it's full implications): > > "Symbols with private visibility can only be accessed from within > the same module" > > https://dlang.org/spec/attribute.html#visibility_attributes It specifies what private does quite accurately. If you want something that's trying to point out how you might misunderstand the spec or what problems you might run into, you'll need to read something like Ali's book. The spec is telling you how the language works, not trying to tell you how you might misunderstand it or what misakes you might make. And the information it gives there is quite accurate and complete. Honestly, I would have thought that knowing that private is private to the module would be plenty to understand what that then means for structs or classes, but everyone thinks differently and absorbs or misses different pieces of information. But ultimately, anyone who doesn't understand something is free to ask in places like D.Learn or stackoverflow. - Jonathan M Davis
