Proposal: Private modules (general discussion)

[josevalim]

@tmbb

I’m totally unaware of Elixir’s early history, and these decisions probably predate the parallel compiler, but these are the ways I personally make sense of the use , require , import and alias .

They do. I don’t want to side-track the discussion but they do predate it as they do four distinct things. We had countless discussions to unify this and the consensus was always that, even if we can hide behind a single API (like Python), they still do distinct things, and the different things are the source of confusion, not the API (as we see similar issues in Python).

@tmbb

You need requirep if you want to use macros from a private module of course. And if you’re going to add both aliasp and requirep , you might as well add usep and importp for completeness.

You could alias first and then do the rest using regular APIs. In this sense, maybe having a separate thing like expose would be better. Unsure. Your point is also valid.

@gregvaughn

Yes, proposal A is great to me.

Thanks!

@dimitarvp

or what if OTP introduces a low level feature in the future that would give us an even better way to communicate privacy?

To be very honest, this is extremely unlikely. This change is far com a consensus here and the Erlang community is even more conservative than us. There is also an old-ish proposal for a similar feature for Erlang as EEP 5.