Re: Private vs. protected functions for refactoring
Roy Smith wrote:
A coworker and I were doing a bit of refactoring yesterday.
We found a hunk of about 10 lines of code that was repeated
and pulled it out into its own little function. I was driving
and started typing out the signature as a private method. My
pair said, "No, that should be protected, not private".
We got into a small discussion about the merits of each. His
contention was that you should make all non-public methods
protected unless there's some good reason not to. I argued
that this little hunk of 10 lines of code didn't seem like
something that would be of general use; it was specific to
this refactoring. He argued that somebody might want to
override the (public) function we had started from and would
need to access this little out-factored bit of code.
Any thoughts on how to approach the private-vs-protected issue?
Protected is, despite the name, part of the public interface
(unless the hierarchy is closed, i.e. you control all of the
derived classes). In practice, I don't think I've ever made
anything in a globally accessable class protected; might as well
make it public, and be done with it.
--
James Kanze (Gabi Software) email: kanze.james@neuf.fr
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