Package-Level¶
Package-level, or internal, visibility is an access modifier that sits between public and private: a member marked this way, such as Java’s default (no-modifier) visibility or Kotlin’s and C#’s internal, is reachable from any code within the same package, module, or compiled assembly, but not from outside it. It lets a library share implementation details across its own files without exposing them as part of its public API.
This gives a third, coarser-grained boundary than the usual class-based private/protected pair: visibility scoped to a whole group of files that ship and evolve together, rather than to a single class and its subclasses.
Package level is also called internal visibility.
PHP’s visibility modifiers, public, protected, and private, are all scoped to the class hierarchy, never to a namespace, directory, or package. There is no modifier that means visible within this namespace, or within this Composer package, but not outside it; a symbol is either fully public to any caller that can reach its fully qualified name, or restricted to the declaring class and its subclasses.
<?php
namespace App\Billing;
class Invoice {
// No modifier means reachable only from App\\Billing in Java;
// in PHP, only public, protected, and private exist, all class-scoped.
public function total(): float { /* ... */ }
}
?>
Related : Visibility, Public Visibility, Private Visibility, Protected Visibility, Namespaces, Module System with Explicit Exports
