Protected

>>Not at the moment. How would it be defined? (keep in mind that
>>multi-methods do not "belong" to classes)
> 
> 
> In Java, protected methods in a class can be accessed in classes that inherit 
> from that class, but not from methods outside said class.
> 
> In Nice, private methods in a class can be accessed in classes that inherit 
> from that class, but only if both classes are defined in the same file.

Sorry to be picky, but this is important to this question: "in classes" is not 
relevant because we are speaking of multi-methods, which can dispatch on all 
their arguments and occur at the package level, outside classes.

Java's definition of "protected" is very much tied to the mono-method model, 
so it is hard to say directly how this can be translated in Nice. What would 
help is to give a realistic but hopefully short example (or a few) of the 
situation, so we can think how that can be handled in the multi-method model.

How is this handled in other multi-method based languages?

Cheers,

Daniel


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