Another newbie question

[Alex Martelli]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:

> My standard object interface is modeled after Meyer's presentation in
> OOSC: an objects state is manipulated with methods and examined with
> attributes; manipulating attributes doesn't change the internal state
> of the object. This makes it possible to change the internal
> representation of a class without having to change all the clients of
> the class to match.

Note that properties enable you to obtain the goal in your final
sentence while letting attributes still be freely assigned -- a vastly
preferable solution.  As far as I recall, Meyer's Eiffel allows this
syntactic transparency for accessing attributes (since it does not
require parentheses in function calls) but not for setting them; so you
might end up writing boilerplate setThis, setThat, and so on, although
at least you're spared the half of the boilerplate that goes getThis,
getThat in typical Java...


Alex