I'm really curious as to why they don't make it, say, protected where the JVM wouldn't actually barf at runtime (or would it? I'm a bit too enmeshed in Scala bi

I'm really curious as to why they don't make it, say, protected where the JVM wouldn't actually barf at runtime (or would it? I'm a bit too enmeshed in Scala bincompat at the moment), but where compiling from source would error out. If I'm wrong: Why not invent a 'protection level' where this were a feasible thing... even if just to be able to remove old APIs and really force people to stop just adding @SuppressWarnings-deprecation all over the place. That's not a solution to anything.