Good question.
If you allow, let me answer it by giving a simple example. Say we have a class that represents date, for example 2003-11-07, and one of its property is month.
- If I make this property public, someone uses this class, can easily set month to 13. Well, this could be well valid for some calendars, but not for this calendar that most of us use. So we opened up a hole for error by make it public. To avoid this error, we have to implement the checking logic in every single piece of code uses this class.
- Now if we make it private, and in the setter, we check whether month is less than or equal to 12, we only need to implement this logic once for good.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|