Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

4
  • This is an interesting response. But I can't see how it answers the encapsulation issue that typical getters violate. Or how you'd make a useful hash table without violating it. Or how hardware or speed are related to this issue. Commented Aug 9 at 3:21
  • @candied_orange The problem is not the getter. The encapsulation problem is when the result from the getter is not the simplest object possible, but rather one upon which the desired behavior supervenes. If there's a getter for getNumObjects that returns an integer, I don't think there's any failure of encapsulation at all. However, if getNumObjects returns a double because, under the hood, the Object is implemented using Lua (a language which only has doubles), that would be an encapsulation failure. Commented Aug 9 at 3:47
  • That's a much more interesting take. Pity it's a comment and not an improvement to the answer. Commented Aug 9 at 18:58
  • @candied_orange I added some text to that effect, although I do think the comments actually do work better. There's something about the Socratic method that is more poignant. Commented Aug 10 at 5:07