Alternative names to defmodulep (split thread)

[Eiji]

@massimo

Private means

belonging to or for the use of one particular person or group of people only.

That’s exactly what private functions and modules are.

Again:

defmodule Example do
  @doc "This belongs only to use of one particular person or group of people."
  def private, do: 5
end

defmodule Example2 do
  @doc "This belongs only to use of one particular person or group of people."
   def private, do: "Sample"
end

defmodule PrivateTest do
  use ExUnit.Case do

  test "example" do
    assert is_integer(Example.private())
    # 2nd assertion would fail
    assert is_integer(Example2.private())
  end
end

# now look:
defmodule Problem do
  def confuse(module), do: apply(module, :private, [])
end
Problem.confuse(Example) # Integer
Problem.confuse(Example2) # String

Person A sign agreement for some job offer. Person B does not know if person A receives payment for hours, specific issue or maybe for whole specific project. That’s why person A should say is saying about agreement name instead of saying saying just about agreement. In any case he/she is working, but this does not mean all cases are exactly same. We could guess, we could assume, but nothing good would happen if we would do so.

That’s why people are using names. If you name something properly other people would understand you without taking care of “source”. Well we could name every pet just pet, because basically all pets are pets. Now you can’t filter images only for cats, because there are no cats - there are only pets. We could generalize everything and saying “thing” on everything, but that would be just confusing.

@massimo

That’s exactly what private functions and modules are.

Just take a look at:

Proposal: Private modules (implementation specific) (closed)

This is really interesting idea! I’m not sure about it. On one hand it could be probably nicer for iex sessions (not sure about it), but on another I would like to see a module which is only accessible for specific library/scope. What would happen if somebody would do: defmodulep NotMyLibrary.Private, visible_to: [NotMyLibrary] do # … end and then I would do something like: defmodule MyApp do # … end # … defmodule NotMyLibrary.SimpleHack do require NotMyLibrary.Private, as: Private …

Now say again that private in both cases means exactly same.

This topic does not talk about making some modules private. We are talking about guarding some modules to … (show warning, don’t allow access it unless). This is definitely not how private functions are working.

You think that private is private and there is no way to access private modules. In my linked example I show how it’s possible in specific implementation case. That’s why I mean it’s confusing. They are named similarly, but works differently. private means private, but here we have 2 different contexts which makes private word more than one meaning and that could be confusing.