Re: Public member variables acceptable?
Daniel T. wrote:
Seungbeom Kim <musiphil@bawi.org> wrote:
Francis Glassborow wrote:
francis_r wrote:
On what principles would the decision to declare a member
public be based?
[...] In general start by making data private until you have an
overwhelming design imperative to make them public.
Would there ever be any overwhelming design imperative to change
already-private data members into public? I doubt it...
Good point. There are design imperatives that would cause you to want to
make a public data member private, but likely no imperative to make
private ones public. So, why make them public in the first place?
Because it may be just what you need, and further encapsulation of
things that don't need one is meaningless.
What I meant by "no overwhelming imperative" is that even if we had
a language rule that banned public data members, that would not make
the language crippled. However, it's inconvenient and cumbersome.
since you already paid the costs by writing the accessor functions
and using them (e.g. p.set_x(p.get_x() + delta)) which is more
verbose than the public data member version (e.g. p.x += delta).
Reverting to the latter would make the code look simpler and
cleaner...
As if those were your only two choices. "tell, don't ask" implies that
the member-function version should be more like p.changeXBy( delta ).
Personally, I don't see p.x += delta as simpler or cleaner than that.
That's a possible case. But there could be also something like this:
// set x and y in some hidden manner, given the old position
void set_position(int& x, int& y);
// with public data members:
set_position(p.x, p.y);
// with private data members and public accessor functions:
int x = p.get_x(), y = p.get_y();
set_position(x, y);
p.set_x_y(x, y);
Using the data members directly is no more complicated than using
the accessor functions. If an accessor function does something smart,
it can always be done by a free function as well:
void changeXBy(point& p, int delta) { p.x += delta; }
--
Seungbeom Kim
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