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Essentially, encapsulation prevents external code from being concerned with the internal workings of an object. Encapsulation allows developers to present a consistent interface that is independent of its internal implementation. As one example, encapsulation can be used to hide the values or state of a structured data object inside a class.
In this sense, the idea of encapsulation is more general than how it is applied in object-oriented programming. For example, a relational database is encapsulated in the sense that its only public interface is a query language (such as SQL), which hides all the internal machinery and data structures of the database management system. As such ...
Object composition is about combining objects within compound objects, and at the same time, ensuring the encapsulation of each object by using their well-defined interface without visibility of their internals. In this regard, object composition differs from data structures, which do not enforce encapsulation.
For example, a simple linearized object would consist of a length field, a code point identifying the class, and a data value. A more complex example would be a command consisting of the length and code point of the command and values consisting of linearized objects representing the command's parameters.
Data encapsulation, also known as data hiding, is the mechanism whereby the implementation details of a class are kept hidden from the user. The user can only perform a restricted set of operations on the hidden members of the class by executing special functions commonly called methods to prevent attributes of objects from being easily viewed and accessed.
In programming languages that support them, properties offer a convenient alternative without giving up the utility of encapsulation. In the examples below, a fully implemented mutator method can also validate the input data or take further action such as triggering an event .
Other programming technologies provide similar benefit. For example, a lambda function also allows for a function to be defined inside of a function (as well as elsewhere) and allows for similar data hiding and encapsulation. Notably, a lambda function has no name (is anonymous) and therefore cannot be called by name and has no visibility aspect.
For example, a parent class, A, can have two subclasses B and C. Both B and C's parent class is A, but B and C are two separate subclasses. Hybrid inheritance Hybrid inheritance is when a mix of two or more of the above types of inheritance occurs. An example of this is when a class A has a subclass B which has two subclasses, C and D.