Code That Says Exactly What It Means

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 31/10/2025 4:03 AM, Dom DiSc wrote:
> On Thursday, 30 October 2025 at 03:48:01 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> There has always been only ONE deficiency for this, and that is 
>> documented unittests being allowed to use private symbols in the module.
> 
> I consider not even this a deficiency, because unittests 
> _within_the_same_module_ are per definition whitebox tests, so they 
> should be allowed to use private stuff. (In C++ they are required to be 
> "friends").
> 
> If you want to do blackbox tests, by definition they have to be written 
> in a different file (as touching the original file would be a violation 
> of "blackbox"). And then they really can't see the private stuff.
> 
> So, everything is fine.
> 
> Having scope private would simply be lying in your pocket. Not having 
> this is a clear improvement.

This isn't what Steven is talking about.

What Steven is talking about is documentation unittests.

These need to be runnable by the user, in a different module.

We've had cases where documentation unittests that are used in examples 
for Phobos not work outside of the module when tried by people.