Re: Re: Visibility

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, Daniel Bonniot said:
 > However, the question is whether classes define scopes or not. It's
 > equally simple to decide that modules define scopes, not
 > classes. Both choices can be seen as consistent with Java, where
 > (basically) there is only one toplevel class per file/module.

We are in complete agreement, "private" must be scoped to the module
in Nice to make any sense for multi-methods.  On the other hand,
classes at the *syntactic* level define a scope via bracketing and
objects are created from classes not modules.

All I'm really arguing for is to make the scope of the visibility
explicit at the definition point.

 >> For simplicity perhaps the more radical suggestion of having each
 >> package definition in a single file and only public and package
 >> visibility.

 > I see a package as containing a (minimal) set of features (classes and
 > methods) that provide a certain functionality. In some cases, having all of
 > them in the same file would make the file too big. Being able to split a
 > package into several files helps the internal organisation, while that
 > organisation is hidden to public clients.

Other languages seem to do alright with one file per package.  Perhaps
thats because they can re-export imported symbols which allows for
package aggregation, ie., one public package and several internal
packages.  Nice and Java only provide this implicitly.

 > Neither, only something much less restrictive: disallow _dispatch_ on
 > interface types (only for non-public methods, that's understood).

Disallowing interface targets seems reasonable.

Rohan



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