Re:Windows Is Bloated, Thanks to Adobe’s Extensible Metadata...
by ygra on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @06:13AM
(#14201851)
Of course internal APIs are accessible to applications. You can always call them somehow. Whether it's fishing "function #183" from a DLL, or reflecting on a managed type and calling stuff that way ... I wouldn't exactly blame MS here.
Public APIs are documented, guaranteed to work like documented (otherwise it's a bug and will be fixed) and intended for others to call. Internal APIs are none of these things. They are not documented because they're not supposed to be called. Anything not documented in an API it (to me at last) something that's not guaranteed to remain like that. Whether it's a complete function or just a side-effect of something that is public.
Public APIs are documented, guaranteed to work like documented (otherwise it's a bug and will be fixed) and intended for others to call. Internal APIs are none of these things. They are not documented because they're not supposed to be called. Anything not documented in an API it (to me at last) something that's not guaranteed to remain like that. Whether it's a complete function or just a side-effect of something that is public.