Access specifiers

The more I think about this, the more I dislike C++'s "private".

If the Clang guys had made their members private and friended the classes they needed, instead of poorly just not shipping the headers in /include, it would be impossible for Wide to exist.

It seems that I simply have a talent for working with existing rules and bending them to do things they were never supposed to do, like exception vomiting, using unique_ptr for file descriptors (I keep being told this is impossible... useless suckers), and now this stuff with Clang.

For example, I know for a fact right now that the LLVM/Clang codebase contains a re-implementation of std::vector because the existing std::vector doesn't do small-allocation stuff. If only std::vector were more open, they would not have had to do that. They could have just futzed with the internals in a somewhat unsafe way.

And protected is even worse. It frustrates me that protected methods and fields can only be used on "this". I have several functions where what I really wanted was to be non-public but accessible to derived class implementations.

At the moment, "protected" in Wide is the revised definition, but I've been thinking about how I might want to nerf private. I've been thinking that I might introduce specifiers like module private/module protected/module public, where other types or functions defined in that module can get extra access rights.

I've also been thinking about adding a kind of access_cast to the language that ignores accessibility-specifiers. But that would entail Improved Error Handling™.

Just as a side note, it occurred to me that I'll need field attributes for fine control of binary module exporting.