ExportPublic.jl

Overview

ExportPublic.jl: Julia macro for people who prefer declaring public/private scoping with syntactic sugar.

Motivation

I made a post on StackOverflow about whether Julia supported syntax for automatically exporting certain functions in modules.

Python distinguishes between weak public and private scoping by prefacing symbols with an underscore (_). The reply I received suggested a package called ExportAll.jl, but I wanted something with syntactic sugar:

module SimpleMathExample
  using ExportPublic

  _secret_pi = 22/7                         # Private
  my_pi = _secret_pi                        # Public

  function add_squared(a::Int, b::Int)      # Public
    _squared(a) + _squared(b)
  end

  function _squared(a::Int)                 # Private
    a ^ 2
  end

  @exportPublic()                           # <--- Export our Public symbols
end

And using this automatically handles exporting symbols:

julia> include("SimpleMathExample.jl")
julia> using .SimpleMathExample
julia> add_squared(5, 5)
50
julia> my_pi
3.142857142857143
julia> _secret_pi
ERROR: UndefVarError: _secret_pi not defined
julia> _squared(5)
ERROR: UndefVarError: _squared not defined

I’ve found having something like this to be helpful during development.