Can someone comment on this?
Do we have C-like distinction between access and visible?
I would think not?
If you can access it you can see it, and vice versa? I can't think of any other case (i.e. where an identifier would be hidden by something that you can't access like in the example below)
We do have the reverse, that a public property/function can expose a private type (but not the name of the type, just its "content" (enum/members))
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Martin,
Last week, while we were discussing the FreePascal accessibility declarations, I began to wonder whether the private/strict private/protected/strict protected keywords really were accessibility values or visibility values. In the reference manual, it uses both terms interchangeably. It says, "The visibility of the different sections is...", but then in the text for each value, it uses verbiage like "can be accessed". In C++, there are situtations where visibility vs. accessibility is an important distinction. My go-to to expose this is hiding rules. For example:
int foo = 1;
class C {
private:
int foo {2};
};
class D : public C {
public:
void func()
{
// illegal because C::foo is visible here, but not accessible.
// Because C::foo is visible, it hides ::foo.
std::cout << foo << '\n';
}
};Or another example:
class C {
public:
int foo { 1 };
};
class D : public C {
private:
int foo { 2 };
};
int main()
{
D obj;
// illegal because D::foo is visible here, but not accessible.
// Because D::foo is visible here, it hides C::foo.
std::cout << obj.foo << '\n';
}My question is: In FreePascal, are there situations like this where the private/strict private/protected/strict protected names can hide other names at global scope? Or at any "outer" scope, for that matter, if these constructs can be declared arbitrarily nested within other constructs, like in Ada. If they all can hide names, to my mind, that rules out using visibility as any part of the description. Instead, if none of them can hide other names, then perhaps all of them should be visibility values instead. Or, if it's impossible to construct an example in FreePascal that can tell the difference, then perhaps I'm just splitting hairs. :)
Regards,
Todd Allen