How do I emulate protected methods, in Dart?

Question

(overheard at the office, and we thought others will benefit)

Suppose I have a base class in a library, which provides some basic features, but which is intended to be derived from by the library user.

For example, I have an abstract Greeting class. Subclasses represent specific types of greetings, like HighFiveGreeting or HugGreeting or whatever. Greeting provides some utility functions for subclasses, like sendGreeting(). I don't want users of these classes to call sendGreeting().

Is that possible? Is there a better idiom in Dart for this kind of thing?

library greeting;  abstract class Greeting {    void sendGreeting(GreetingEvent event) { ... } } 

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library custom_greeting; import 'greeting.dart';  class HugGreeting extends Greeting {    // code here uses sendGreeting() } 

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library main; import 'custom_greeting.dart';  var hug = new HugGreeting(); hug.sendGreeting(...); // should not compile 

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Answer 1

Like stated here, now there is the @protected annotation in the meta package

I would love to know the reasons why to omit the public|private|protected keywords from the language BTW... :'(