Today though I started a new batch of work on Tangent. In previous revisions, the language pretty much ignored visibility (public, private, etc). So today's work was a start down the road towards correcting that. Unfortunately, that sort of thing touches code everywhere. Worse yet, looking back at some of the code and thinking about it, I realized that method groups weren't being dealt with properly with regards to visibility. So there's that.
The other thing that needed to be done was being more intelligent regarding variable storage. A co-worker of mine pointed out that private variables shouldn't cause trouble if inherited. They should be invisible with pretty much every regard to the inheriting class.
This makes sense, but was not something I had in mind when devising the type system for the language. Inheritance just takes the definitions within the base class and imports them up to the inheritor. Definitions with the same name got mixed to provide the superset of the two. That breaks down when the two definitions should be totally distinct values...
The work today is taking allowing that private variable isolation. It is mostly done, just some initializer quirks to clean up.
