Should protection attributes disambiguate?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1064.1308621500.14074.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On 2011-06-20 17:36, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
>> On 6/21/11, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote:
>> > That's not necessarily a bug
>>
>> Maybe the naming of the issue is wrong, but it has to be a bug:
>> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6180
>>
>> If private symbols are not usable, then creating an object of a
>> private class type is a pretty major bug, methinks.
>
> Oh, yes. That's a bug. But having two symbols which clash where one is 
> private
> and the other public isn't a bug. It may be a design decision which merits
> revisiting, but as I understand it, it's a natural consequence of the fact
> that access modifiers modify access, not visibility.
>

Isn't visibility a form of access?

Regardless, I think it's clear that the whole point of a private "access" 
modifier is to make things *private* and safely encapsulated. The current 
situation clearly breaks this. And since visibility without access is 
useless, I don't see any reason to even get into the subtle semantics of 
"visibility" vs "access" at all.