Private is intended to prevent accidental misuse, not as a security mechanism. If you choose to bypass it then you can do so at your own risk and the assumption you know what you are doing.
Personally, I feel that it is. Documentation is often the most useful to future developers maintaining your software – especially member documentation. Even public API documentation is only of limited use to any audience other than a developer. Document for those following – they will thank you.
Well, unit testing should test units and ideally every class is a self-contained unit – this follows directly from the single responsibility principle. So testing private members of a class shouldn’t be necessary – the class is a black box that can be covered in a unit test as-is. On the other hand, this isn’t … Read more
This function could easily have been made freestanding, since it doesn’t require an object of the class to operate within. Making a function a static member of a class rather than a free function gives two advantages: It gives the function access to private and protected members of any object of the class, if the … Read more
Please note that there is no such thing as “private method” in Python. Double underscore is just name mangling: >>> class A(object): … def __foo(self): … pass … >>> a = A() >>> A.__dict__.keys() [‘__dict__’, ‘_A__foo’, ‘__module__’, ‘__weakref__’, ‘__doc__’] >>> a._A__foo() So therefore __ prefix is useful when you need the mangling to occur, for … Read more
sizeof(SomeStruct) != sizeof(SomeStructSource). This will cause someone to find you and murder you someday.
The first one is a read-only field, while the second one gets compiled as a pair of methods (and all reads of the property ProductLocation gets compiled into calls to the corresponding get method and writes to it gets compiled into calls to the set method; internally, these methods will read from / write to … Read more
If the class contains any template member functions you can specialize that member function to suit your needs. Even if the original developer didn’t think of it. safe.h class safe { int money; public: safe() : money(1000000) { } template <typename T> void backdoor() { // Do some stuff. } }; main.cpp: #include <safe.h> #include … Read more
classes are just functions so they create scopes. everything defined inside this scope won’t be visible from the outside. class Foo # this will be our private method. it is invisible # outside of the current scope foo = -> “foo” # this will be our public method. # note that it is defined with … Read more
Because that’s how it works in C++. In C++ access control works on per-class basis, not on per-object basis. Access control in C++ is implemented as a static, compile-time feature. I think it is rather obvious that it is not really possible to implement any meaningful per-object access control at compile time. Only per-class control … Read more