Thread: member functions not working properly

Originally Posted by medievalelks

In good OO design, classes encapsulate behavior. Just providing getters and setters of state is not a lot different than passing structs around.

That was not the point frankly. While I would agree that getters and setters can break encapsulation it depends on what the object is supposed to do, and even then, messaging is still a fundamental OOP concept.

From wikipedia:

Message passing

"The process by which an object sends data to another object or asks the other object to invoke a method.” [1] Also known to some programming languages as interfacing. E.g. the object called Breeder may tell the Lassie object to sit by passing a 'sit' message which invokes Lassie's 'sit' method.

Originally Posted by citizen

That was not the point frankly. While I would agree that getters and setters can break encapsulation it depends on what the object is supposed to do, and even then, messaging is still a fundamental OOP concept.

From wikipedia:

Yes, "sit" is a behavior of dog. Calling member functions to set the position of the dog's legs, hind quarters, tail, etc. to place it in a sitting position is what I'm arguing against. Inside the dog class, it perhaps has-a Mesh, on which operations like this might make sense.

Originally Posted by Elysia

But then again, the outside should probably not be able to control the dog directly. Either you make the object public, or make a get function or just wrapper functions. The latest would provide more encapsulation.

Well, at some point, *something* is going to use the dog's public interface. I was focussing on the granularity of that interface.