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In software systems, encapsulation refers to the bundling of data with the mechanisms or methods that operate on the data. It may also refer to the limiting of direct access to some of that data, such as an object's components. [1] Essentially, encapsulation prevents external code from being concerned with the internal workings of an object.
C++ uses the three modifiers called public, protected, and private. [3] C# has the modifiers public, protected,internal, private, protected internal, private protected, and file. [4] Java has public, package, protected, and private; package is the default, used if no other access modifier keyword is specified. The meaning of these modifiers may ...
Only methods that are part of the same class can access private members. Protected (or class-protected) allows the class itself and all its subclasses to access the member. Public means that any code can access the member by its name. Although many object-oriented languages support the above access specifiers,their semantics may differ.
Methods may also be designed public, private, or intermediate levels such as protected (which allows access from the same class and its subclasses, but not objects of a different class). [44] In other languages (like Python) this is enforced only by convention (for example, private methods may have names that start with an underscore).
Mutator methods may also be used in non-object-oriented environments. In this case, a reference to the variable to be modified is passed to the mutator, along with the new value. In this scenario, the compiler cannot restrict code from bypassing the mutator method and changing the variable directly.
Reducing access level is an effective method for limiting failure modes, reducing debugging time, and simplifying overall system complexity. It restricts variable modification to only the methods defined within the interface to the class. Thus, it is incorporated into many fundamental software design patterns. In general, a given object cannot ...
In Python, if a name is intended to be "private", it is prefixed by one or two underscores. Private variables are enforced in Python only by convention. Names can also be suffixed with an underscore to prevent conflict with Python keywords. Prefixing with double underscores changes behaviour in classes with regard to name mangling.
In object-oriented programming, a friend function, that is a "friend" of a given class, is a function that is given the same access as methods to private and protected data. [1] A friend function is declared by the class that is granting access, so friend functions are part of the class interface, like methods.