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by jandrewrogers
370 days ago
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I think the bigger issue with "public" and "private" is that is insufficiently granular, being essentially all or nothing. The use of those APIs in various parts of the code base is not self-documenting. Hyrum's Law is undefeated. C++ has the PassKey idiom that allows you to whitelist what objects are allowed to access each part of the public API at compile-time. This is a significant improvement but a pain to manage for complex whitelists because the language wasn't designed with this in mind. C++26 has added language features specifically to make this idiom scale more naturally. I'd love to see more explicit ACLs on APIs as a general programming language feature. |
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In that I agree, but per-member public/private/protected is a dead end.
I'd like a high level language which explores organizing all application data in a single, globally accessible nested struct and filesystem-like access rights into 'paths' of this global struct (read-only, read-write or opaque) for specific parts of the code.
Probably a bit too radical to ever become mainstream (because there's still this "global state == bad" meme - it doesn't have to be evil with proper access control - and it would radically simplify a lot of programs because you don't need to control access by passing 'secret pointers' around).