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From: johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: DIRECT REFERENCE CONSIDERED HARMFUL
Message-ID: <80500079@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 23 Nov 89 17:39:08 GMT
References: <1865@netxcom.DHL.COM>
Lines: 12
Nf-ID: #R:netxcom.DHL.COM:1865:p.cs.uiuc.edu:80500079:000:537
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson    Nov 22 10:28:00 1989


My experience in Smalltalk-80 is that it is better to access instance
variables directly than to use messages.  The reason is that the
browser lets you find all the variable references and change them
in about two minutes, so it is easy to convert to messages if you
need them.  It isn't possible to make Smalltalk messages really
private, so writing accessing messages destroys information hiding.
Further, I think that direct accessing is a little more readable.

I agree that efficiency concerns are not important here.

Ralph Johnson