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+1 for interfaces. This is a good example a problem they were designed to solve. Why not more up votes for this answer? It is certainly better than internal flags.

mortalapeman
– mortalapeman

2013-03-28 03:47:09 +00:00
Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 3:47
1

@mortalapeman: "Better" is relative: Using interfaces this way does not make the object immutable but only the mutating methods inaccessible. There is no way to prevent someone having a reference to the object to cast it to the class A and calling e.g. setB(…). With flags (as described in delnans answer) the object ensures that it is immutable. It would probably be a good idea to combine both methods though, i.e. use a flag to ensure immutability and add a interface to let clients only see relevant methods.

siegi
– siegi

2016-04-19 16:17:13 +00:00
Commented Apr 19, 2016 at 16:17

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