Find symbol in unknown module at compile time?

[ketmar via Digitalmars-d]

On Sun, 07 Dec 2014 21:44:51 +0000
bitwise via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> I would like to be able to reflect private members though... Is
> there any way to give a module private access to an unrelated
> module?
nope. and i hope there will be no such thing. ;-)

> I understand that packages are meant to solve this problem for 
> regular code, but given the fact that D has such a comprehensive 
> reflection system, it would be nice to have this special case.
you either want to inspect something from the outside and then it's not
private, or it's private and invisible to the strangers.

by introducing hacks you killing the protection idiom altogether. if
you need to modify the module you want to inspect to insert pragma...
well, make the necessary things 'package'-protected and and inspector
to the package: you modified the module anyway.

if you want to allow external pragmas that allows poking private module
data... well, just make everything in that module public, you just
killed the whole protection thing. ;-)

what i really want to say is that if you need to even know about
private members from the outside of the module, something is very-very
wrong. dump the idea that reflection can do at least *something* with
private parts. that's bad. that's dangerous. that's dirty. *nobody* can
know anything about object internals except the object and his close
friends living in the same module.

either don't make it private or pretend that it's non-existant for
the outside world.
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