cast(public)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"dsimcha" <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:h3q5td$2jqa$1 at digitalmars.com...
>I know I've probably mentioned this one here before, but it was buried in 
>long
> threads.
>
> Could we put a feature in the language that allows private member 
> variables to
> be cast to public?  The idea is that, if a class/struct designer makes
> something private, they're saying it's a bad idea to mess with it, and 
> that
> you do so at your own risk.  However, I think there needs to be a back 
> door to
> cowboy this one, because otherwise private/protected is just too 
> restrictive
> for a language like D.  It would work something like this:
>
> struct Foo {
>    private uint bar;
> }
>
> void main() {
>    Foo foo;
>    foo.bar++;  // error
>    (cast(public) foo.bar)++;  // Works.
> }

I don't see a real legitimate point to this. If you need something from a 
module not provided by a public interface (or protected sub-classing) than 
that needs to be properly added to the module's interface. Otherwise you're 
just asking for your code to be broken (in a way that may *or* may not be 
fixable) the moment the module you're hacking into is updated. Why hack it, 
when you could just make a proper added feature? Sure, there may be 
source-not-available stuff, but if you need some extra feature from a 
library that doesn't have source available, and the lib's developers aren't 
receptive to your need, then you're just simply using the wrong library 
anyway.