On Tuesday, January 24, 2012 18:58:45 Martin Nowak wrote: > Should aliases be allowed to raise the accessibility of a symbol? > > http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4533
Having an alias make a symbol more accessible makes no sense to me IMHO. If you're talking about private -> public, then why is the symbol private in the first place, since you're then in the same module making the same thing both public and private - just with different names. And if you really want one of the two symbols private and the other public, why not just switch them and use a private alias? The only time that that wouldn't work that I can think of would be a templated type, in which case does it really hurt to have the type be public anyway? The real problem though is protected->public. That makes it possible for one module to increase the access level of the symbol in another module. That's completely unacceptable IMHO. No module should have control over another module's symbols' access level. So, I definitely think that an alias should not allow a symbol to become _more_ accessible. > http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6013 Private aliase make a lot of sense to me as long as they actually hide the symbol. That would allow you to rename a symbol internally (e.g. using it to indicate that whenever you use indexOf without fully qualifiying it, you mean the one from std.algorithm, not the one from std.string) without affecting any modules that import that module. However, if it works how private normally works and just affects access level, not visibility, then it's utterly pointless. And unfortunately, at present, that appears to be how it works. So, creating any aliases that aren't public seems like a _bad_ idea to me, since it will needlessly affect other modules. If private actually hid symbols instead of just making them inaccessible though, it would be a completely different story. - Jonathan M Davis
