Simetrical wrote:
On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 6:18 AM, tstarling@svn.wikimedia.org wrote:
- Use protected instead of private. Private should not be used ever.
That's a pretty strong statement. If you use protected, you can't freely change around the methods unless you're sure nobody's actually extended the class (in which case, what harm would there have been in using private to start with?). If you use private, you can always change it to protected later if it's useful, but not vice versa.
That's what grep is for.
I'm generally against visibility/access control in object oriented programming. Protected is a compromise.
-- Tim Starling