"Alaric B. Snell" <> writes:
> On Wednesday 23 October 2002 13:35, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>
> > Interesting perspective. While I do occasionally tweak
> > public/protected/private for performance reasons, especially in J2ME, my
> > days spent in XML have made it very hard for me to consider making
> > anything private, and even protected requires some thought.
>
> One argument for privatising every field in Java is that if you then
> laboriously write pairs of get... and set... methods for each field then you
> can (later) put in consistency checks for valid field values, automatic
> updating of indices, security checks, etc. by modifying or overriding those
> get/set variables.
>
> Ideally, of course, one would have a language where foo.bar = baz is just a
> shorthand for foo.setBar (baz) and foo.bar is short for foo.getBar (), like
> my beloved Dylan, since then you can declare fields public or public-read
> private-write as you see fit and still add behaviour later. Or remove the
> actual field storage altogether and replace it with a computation.
I believe that's it's done in VB.
Ari.
