St\'ephane Ducasse, Nathanael Sch{\"a}rli, Roel Wuyts. Open Surfaces for Controlled Visibility. In Proceedings of the ECOOP '03 Workshop on Object-oriented Language Engineering for the Post-Java Era. jul 2003.
Current languages contain visibility mechanisms such as private, protected, or public to control who can see what. However, these visibility mechanisms are fixed once for all. Moreover, they do not solve all problems related to the visibility, and are typically of a static nature. In this position paper we present an open and uniform way of dealing with visibility and introduce surfaces: i.e., list of methods that control the way the behavior of an ob ject is accessible. We introduce two problems that other visibility mechanisms cannot solve, and show how surfaces can.