Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!polya!shap
From: shap@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Can we hide the private part of a class ?
Keywords: header dependency, efficiency.
Message-ID: <4223@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 3 Oct 88 01:24:16 GMT
References: <1358@stratus> <1988Sep29.044111.16104@utzoo.uucp> <4193@polya.Stanford.EDU> <1368@cumulus>
Reply-To: shap@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 18

In article <1368@cumulus> hsu@cumulus.UUCP (Yung-Kao Hsu) writes:
>---------
>
>In article <1988Sep29.044111.16104@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp
>(Henry Spencer) writes:
>
>>The user can't access x, so seeing it won't do him much good.  However,
>
>This is true if all public functions won't return any pointer to x.
>But, sometimes for efficiency reason, we will allow such bad pratice.

The fact that a programmer can willfully break the type system is not
a good argument here. I can also use integer pointers as character
pointers. If the function returning pointer wants to be type-safe,
it should be declared as returning a pointer to a class member. In
that case, what Henry says continues to be true.

Jon