On Saturday, 19 November 2022 at 19:59:20 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
.. ... Ali
The 10 years was mentioned, because it was what I learnt over that period (well, long before that actually). It wasn't mentioned to demonstrate that I have some superior knowledge. Object data needs to be protected. It often needs its 'invariants' altered.
There are far more reasons for inserting getters/setters and design stage, than leaving them out at design stage, in order to save some keystrokes, or code bloat.
How often do you design your class? How often to users use your class, and ask for changes? Better to anticipate change - the cost of that is much smaller at design time.
If you learnt something different over your 30+ years, good for you, and your team, and your customers.
But in my experience, public member variables rarely make sense in a 'class' type, and I'd put protected in the same principle.
This is not a hard and fast rule. But it makes sense in most cases.
Perhaps you can direct me to a software engineering *team* that builds *class* library's for a living, and that also use public member variables in their classes. Perhaps they can teach me something I do not know. I'm happy to learn more.
Your post was mainly about struct types?? This thread is about the relevance of getters/setters in a 'class' type.
btw. If you can get away with using public member variables, you likely don't need a class type.
