Re: Inconsistencies when accessing protected members

On 3/26/08, Richard Quadling <rquadling@googlemail.com> wrote: > It just doesn't seem right to be able to call a private or protected > method of another instance. Sort of isn't private any more. > And as for being able to call a protected method of a completely > different class, just because it shares the same ancestry. That seems > REALLY wrong. it is needed for operations on several instances of the same class-hierarchy. "private" means, that you are the author of the class and you know what you are doing with instances of this class, but you do not want to export that inner-functionality. use case for "protected" is similiar, but relates to cases when you have hierarchy of classes, which still have some common functionality, which might be usable for multi-instance operations -- Alexey Zakhlestin http://blog.milkfarmsoft.com/