Private visible?

[Walter Bright]

Dave wrote:
> Everyone seems to agree that 'private' should not be accessible and the 
> current behavior is a bug. What we're all wondering is if 'private' can 
> also mean 'invisible' because that seems to be more intuitive. Than you 
> don't have that extra level of complexity for lookup resolution and 
> things like error messages describing a private interface.

The original reason why private members would be visible but not 
accessible has been forgotten. However, there were some significant 
issues brought up with making them invisible:

1) function overloading - if various overloads of a function have 
different protections, different functions will be selected even though 
the same arguments are presented. This can be surprising when code is 
moved around. If they are visible, you'll get an error message instead 
of silently varying behavior.

2) function overloading - one could lose the ability to 'poison' an 
operation on certain argument types, because instead the private 
function will not be seen and another selected.

3) function overriding - if a private function in a derived class 
overrides a public one in a base class, this overriding will not happen 
if the private function is invisible. Not only does this break 
encapsulation, it prevents the design pattern of being able to 'poison' 
certain operations on a class.