# Hiding and exporting

The folowing procedures can be used in two ways. First to provide a clearer indication of visibility than is given by the capitalization convention (which exists partly to support old style `m3makefile`s). Second, to change the visibility of imported components. Generally, it's much better to convince the owners of the exporting package to give their sources the correct visibility rather than overriding their initial decision.

hide_interface(X) sets the visibility of interface `X.i3` to hidden.

export_interface(X) sets the visibility of interface `X.i3` to visible.

There are also variants that hide or export programs and generics, `hide_program`, `hide_generic_interface`, `hide_generic_implementation`, `export_program`, `export_generic_interface`, and `export_generic_implementation`.

Hidden program are not copied to the `/bin` directory, exported ones are.

    Last modified on Thu Jan  4 11:07:54 PST 1996 by heydon
         modified on Thu Apr 21 16:49:58 PDT 1994 by kalsow
         modified on Thu Jan  7 18:40:57 PST 1993 by muller