Re: [Libxmlplusplus-general] coding style issues

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld sympatico ca>]

Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 17:13, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
>
> > 3) hiding state in the private section:
> >    It's a matter of good encapsulation to put all members into the
> >    private section, and then provide accessors (either public or
> >    protected). That helps to decouple dependencies between base and
> >    derived classes. Of course, derived classes then can't access the
> >    member variable. That's exactly the point, that's the goal !
>
>
> And I say "you can't predict the future" so you should not completely hide complex types.

that is a very dangerous argument, at least when applied in general:
What if my wrapper acts as a proxy, or serializes access (making the API 
thread-safe), etc. ? This totally defeats the whole point of
encapsulation.
That said, the question really needs to be addressed case by case.

Regards,
		Stefan