Re: [Discussion] "Internal" attribute and warning

Am 18.05.24 um 19:46 schrieb Robert Landers:

On Sat, May 18, 2024 at 7:38 PM Andreas Heigl <andreas@heigl.org> wrote:

Hey all. Am 18.05.24 um 16:00 schrieb Robert Landers:

Hello internals, I've been thinking about having an "internal" attribute that will emit a warning if called from outside it's left-most namespace. It might look something like this: namespace MyCompany\PackageA {

    #[\Internal] function doStuff() {}

} namespace OtherCompany\PackageB {

    \MyCompany\PackageA\doStuff(); // warning emitted

} namespace MyCompany\PackageB {

    \MyCompany\PackageB\doStuff(); // left-most part of namespace

matches, no warning } This would allow for library maintainers to mark internal constructs as such and provide users with feedback that they are using code that may be changed without any notice. Any thoughts?

I do like the idea in general of being able to mark certain things as internal to a certain namespace. My question is more in the direction of: If we are not enforcing breaking the code but merely emit a warning then that is IMO not something that we need to implement on the language level. People will still be able to use the internal method and just ignore the warning.

I guess that depends on what you mean by "break the code." Many people turn warnings into exceptions, and for those people this will effectively break their code. Some people may choose to ignore it one way or another, but that would be up to them. The idea isn't to break people's code though, it's to provide a way to mark very-malleable APIs in libraries. Maybe, "Internal" is a bad name for this, but it's the most logical.

The trouble I see is that there are two kind of people: Those that care about such things and those that don't. Those that care about such things will already find these issues during static analysis. Those that don't care will not turn errors into exceptions but instead have error-reporting set to 0 That's why I am hesitant in adding this to the engine but instead would love to see this as part of userland maintained static analyzers. Cheers Andreas -- ,,, (o o) +---------------------------------------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo-+ | Andreas Heigl | | mailto:andreas@heigl.org N 50°22'59.5" E 08°23'58" | | https://andreas.heigl.org | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | https://hei.gl/appointmentwithandreas | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | GPG-Key: https://hei.gl/keyandreasheiglorg | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+

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