[development] Question about Drupal ACLs

Hello, I'm new to the mailing list so I'm sorry if this has been covered before. I'm curious to see if there are built in mechanisms or maybe other modules that will allow me to assign ACLs to specific nodes. In particular I want to show or hide menu items and restrict access to their linked nodes based on a user's role. So far I haven't found anything (that works) fitting this description in Drupal or it's modules. So my question is: Did I miss it, and if I didn't would people in the community be interested in a module that provided this level of access control? Thanks for your time! -- Nick Whalen <nick@gottathink.com> Gottathink, LLC