note 52228 deleted from language.oop5.constants by danbrown

Note Submitter: esad at 25novembar dot com ---- Refering to caliban at darklock dot com's article: The whole idea of visibility is implementing the concept of data hiding and encapsulation. This means exposing as little as possible of the class variables/methods, in order to maintain loose coupling. If you reference all your variables in your class directly, you've probably missed the point of OOP. If the variable visibility is set to private it shouldn't be readable outside the class (performing tricks to read it is pointless, if you want to read something, make it public, it's your code). This is not used to obfuscate/hide a variable from someone but to enforce good coding practice of maintaining the loose coupling between objects. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CouplingAndCohesion