Visibility

Hi,

Some news from the front: Artem Kozarezov has made a first major contribution 
by improving the static nullness analysis in the presence of assignments. The 
compiler now reports fewer spurious errors about possibly null values. Arjan 
has added some convenient syntax, like binary literals and 'instance ?Type'.

I've started to put in place the infrastructure to support proper visibility 
checking and imports. As a proof of concept, visibility is now enforced (in 
CVS) for toplevel values and variables (private, "default" and public). This 
would be the good time to hear ideas about the kind of visibility control is 
desirable. Is the private/default/public model good enough? References to 
interesting languages or articles on this subject are also welcome.

Another question is the transition policy. I suppose that a good part of 
existing Nice programs will need updating (since public woule not be the 
default visibility). Is it fine to just let them break, since the error will 
direct to the symbol that need to be made public? Or should we start with only 
enforcing private, and warnings for non-public access? (possibly a bit more 
work to implement, but feasible)

As usual the latest working version of the compiler is available for testing, 
see http://nice.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Dev/DevelopmentVersion

Cheers,

Daniel



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