Why does this public field have a PRIVATE flag?

Question

I'm writing a Scala macro and am traversing the tree to find non-private fields in classes.

Consider this code that the macro looks at:

class Foo {
  val bar: String = "test"
}

I'm traversing this code and getting to bar's ValDef. It has only two flags in its modifiers: Flag.PRIVATE and Flag.LOCAL.

Using the private modifier on bar changes nothing. Using the protected modifier only adds Flag.PROTECTED to the list of flags.

What am I missing? How do I make the distinction between private and public fields?

Edit:

The following code:

val bar: String = "test"

Has neither Flag.PRIVATE nor Flag.LOCAL, which makes sense since it's a 'global' public val.

The context I'm working inside is writing a new wart for wartremover, which simply takes a Traverser from the context's universe when expanding the macro and traverses over the block of code.

Answer 1

A val definition in Scala expands to a private[this] field with an additional getter. Other than the ValDef you're seeing there should be an additional DefDef method definition with the same name which is the getter on the field.