Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, March 07, 2012 17:06:21 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Ahh, yea I remember now. I'd argue (strongly) that if a symbol is
> inaccessible than it should never conflict with a symbol that is accessible.
> After all, is there really much more point to the "visible vs accessible"
> distinction besides just being able to say "Symbol xxxx is private" instead
> of "Unrecognzed symbol xxxx"?

Well, truth be told, it should be possible for the compiler to still say that 
the symbol is private rather than that it's unrecognized. Just because it's 
hidden for overload resolution and the like doesn't mean that the compiler 
couldn't still recognize it as existing but inaccessible in cases where 
there's no other match. It _is_ probably easier to implement it with the 
"unrecognized symbol" behavior though.

The only real downside that I can think of of making private symbols hidden is 
that it could cause issues when symbols are changed to or from private, but 
the way that overload sets are handled probably prevents that from being a 
real issue. It may break code, but I don't think that it would silently break 
code to change a symbol to or from private, which would be the real problem.

- Jonathan M Davis