Skip to main content

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.

5
  • 14
    I don't understand this argument. Let's say you are working on a program where you are the only developer and you are the only one who would EVER use your libraries, are you saying in that case you make EVERY member public because you have access to the source code? Commented Aug 8, 2011 at 14:36
  • @aquinas: that's quite different. Making everything public will lead to horrible programming practices. Allowing a type to see private fields of other instances of itself is a very narrow case. Commented Aug 8, 2011 at 14:41
  • 2
    No, I'm not advocating making every member public. Heavens no! My argument is, if you're already in the source, can see the private members, how they are used, conventions employed, etc., then why not be able to use that knowledge? Commented Aug 8, 2011 at 14:44
  • 7
    I think the way of thinking is still in the terms of the type. If the type cannot be trusted to deal with the members of the type properly, what can? (Normally, it would be a programmer actually controlling the interactions, but in this age of code-generation tools, that may not always be the case.) Commented Aug 8, 2011 at 14:47
  • 3
    My question isn't really of trust, more of necessity. Trust is totally irrelevant when you can use reflection to heinous things to privates. I'm wondering why, conceptually, you can access the privates. I assumed there was a logical reason rather than a best-practices situation. Commented Aug 8, 2011 at 14:50