Advantages
- The internal storage format of the data is hidden; in the example, an expectation of the use of restricted character sets could allow data compression through recoding (e.g., of eight bit characters to a six bit code). An attempt to encode characters out of the range of the expected data could then be handled by casting an error in the set routine.
- In general, the get and set methods may be produced in two versions - an efficient method that assumes that the caller is delivering appropriate data and that the data has been stored properly, and a debugging version that while slower, performs validity checks on data received and delivered. Such detection is useful when routines (calling or called) or internal storage formats are newly created or modified.
- The location of the stored data within larger structures may be hidden and so enabling changes to be made to this storage without the necessity of changing the code that references the data. This also reduces the likelihood of unexpected side effects from such changes. This is especially advantageous when the accessors are part of an operating system (OS), a case where the calling (application) code may not be available to the developers of the OS.
Read more about this topic: Field Encapsulation
Famous quotes containing the word advantages:
“In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted himself that advantages of his solitude, he abandoned it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)