On Wednesday, 30 January 2013 at 04:39:13 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe
wrote:
There's times when a member variable manages its own invariant
and any of its values is valid for the containing class, in
which case the container doesn't need to further restrict
access to it; a public struct doesn't need to be wrapped in a
get function or anything.
Okay, so we have this:
struct Foo
{
Bar bar;
}
Assume that all data in Bar is stack allocated and we can't
change it. What if I later on realize, that I should have really
allocated bar on the heap, because its size is too great and it
makes Foo inconvenient in every-day use because of stack overflow
problems. Now that everybody has already been using foo.bar
directly, I feel really bad for not encapsulating it.
Note: that's not a problem if we have a way of saying that bar
should behave like a property function, something like:
struct Foo
{
@property Bar bar;
}
...and if we can create that property function later on.
