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From: johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Data Hiding...
Message-ID: <80500086@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 90 17:40:02 GMT
References: <20@<4820c7e4>
Lines: 12
Nf-ID: #R:<4820c7e4:20:p.cs.uiuc.edu:80500086:000:617
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson    Jan 22 08:00:00 1990


I agree with David Yon that accessing another's objects instance
variables is often (usually?) not a good thing to do.  I call this
treating an object like a record.  When I see code that does this
(all too often I am the author, but I fix other people's code, too)
then I will try to understand why the program is accessing the
instance variables and try to create new methods in the object's
class that eliminate the need to have the accessing methods.  This
almost always improves the quality of the code.  Sometimes accessing
the instance variables is the correct thing to do, but often it is not.

Ralph Johnson